F 
531 

HG 


THE  CHRONICLES 

OF  AMERICA  SERIES 

ALLEN  JOHNSON 

EDITOR 

UC— NRLF 


kjiD    M3    D5fl 
THE 
PASSING  OF  THE 


EMERSON  HOUGH 


COLLEGE  OF  AGRICULTURE 
DAVIS,  CALIFORNIA 


THE  CHRONICLES 

OF  AMERICA  SERIES 

ALLEN  JOHNSON 

EDITOR* 

GERHARD  R.  LOMER 

CHARLES    W.    JEFFERYS 

ASSISTANT   EDITORS 


THE  PASSING 
OF  THE  FRONTIER 

A  CHRONICLE  OF  THE  OLD  WEST 
BY  EMERSON  HOUGH 


NEW  HAVEN:  YALE   UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

TORONTO:  GLASGOW,  BROOK   &   CO. 

LONDON:  HUMPHREY   MILFORD 

OXFORD   UNIVERSITY   PRESS 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

LIBRARY 

COLLEGE  OF  AGRICULTURE 
DAVIS 


Copyright,  1918,  by  Yale  University  Press 


CONTENTS 

I.    THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY  Page  1 

II.    THE  RANGE  "  11 

III.    THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  "  28 

IV._THE  COWBOY  "  40 

V.    THE  MINES  "  57 

VI.    PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST  "  83 

VII.    THE  INDIAN  WARS  "  112 

VIII.    THE  CATTLE  KINGS  "  137 

IX.    THE  HOMESTEADER  "  I51 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  "  175 

INDEX  "  179 


THE  PASSING   OF  THE  FRONTIER 
CHAPTER  I 

THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY 

THE  frontier!  There  is  no  word  in  the  English 
language  more  stirring,  more  intimate,  or  more  be- 
loved. It  has  in  it  all  the  Slan  of  the  old  French 
phrase,  En  avant!  It  carries  all  of  the  old  Saxon 
command,  Forward!  It  means  all  that  America 
ever  meant.  It  means  the  old  hope  of  a  real  per- 
sonal liberty,  and  yet  a  real  human  advance  in 
character  and  achievement.  To  a  genuine  Amer- 
ican it  is  the  dearest  word  in  all  the  world. 

What  is,  or  was,  the  frontier?  Where  was  it? 
Under  what  stars  did  it  lie?  Because,  as  the 
vague  Iliads  of  ancient  heroes  or  the  nebulous 
records  of  the  savage  gentlemen  of  the  Middle 
Ages  make  small  specific  impingement  on  our 
consciousness  today,  so  also  even  now  begin  the 

1 


2         THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

tales  of  our  own  old  frontier  to  assume  a  haziness, 
an  unreality,  which  makes  them  seem  less  history 
than  folklore.  Now  the  truth  is  that  the  American 
frontier  of  history  has  many  a  local  habitation 
and  many  a  name.  And  this  is  why  it  lies  some- 
what indefinite  under  the  blue  haze  of  the  years, 
all  the  more  alluring  for  its  lack  of  definition,  like 
some  old  mountain  range,  the  softer  and  more 
beautiful  for  its  own  shadows. 

The  fascination  of  the  frontier  is  and  has  ever 
been  an  undying  thing.  Adventure  is  the  meat 
of  the  strong  men  who  have  built  the  world  for 
those  more  timid.  Adventure  and  the  frontier 
are  one  and  inseparable.  They  suggest  strength, 
courage,  hardihood  —  qualities  beloved  in  men 
since  the  world  began  —  qualities  which  are  the 
very  soul  of  the  United  States,  itself  an  experiment, 
an  adventure,  a  risk  accepted.  Take  away  all 
our  history  of  political  regimes,  the  story  of  the 
rise  and  fall  of  this  or  that  partizan  aggregation 
in  our  government;  take  away  our  somewhat 
inglorious  military  past;  but  leave  us  forever  the 
tradition  of  the  American  frontier!  There  lies  our 
comfort  and  our  pride.  There  we  never  have 
failed.  There,  indeed,  we  always  realized  our 
ambitions.  There,  indeed,  we  were  efficient,  be- 


THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY  3 

fore  that  hateful  phrase  was  known.  There  we 
were  a  melting-pot  for  character,  before  we  came 
to  know  that  odious  appellation  which  classifies 
us  as  the  melting-pot  of  the  nations. 

The  frontier  was  the  place  and  the  time  of 
the  strong  man,  of  the  self-sufficient  but  restless 
individual.  It  was  the  home  of  the  rebel,  the 
protestant,  the  unreconciled,  the  intolerant,  the 
ardent  —  and  the  resolute.  It  was  not  the  con- 
servative and  tender  man  who  made  our  history; 
it  was  the  man  sometimes  illiterate,  oftentimes 
uncultured,  the  man  of  coarse  garb  and  rude 
weapons.  But  the  frontiersmen  were  the  true 
dreamers  of  the  nation.  They  really  were  the 
possessors  of  a  national  vision.  Not  statesmen 
but  riflemen  and  riders  made  America.  The 
noblest  conclusions  of  American  history  still  rest 
upon  premises  which  they  laid. 

But,  in  its  broadest  significance,  the  frontier 
knows  no  country.  It  lies  also  in  other  lands 
and  in  other  times  than  our  own.  When  and 
what  was  the  Great  Frontier?  We  need  go  back 
only  to  the  time  of  Drake  and  the  sea-dogs,  the 
Elizabethan  Age,  when  all  North  America  was 
a  frontier,  almost  wholly  unknown,  compellingly 
alluring  to  all  bold  men.  That  was  the  day  of 


4         THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

new  stirrings  in  the  human  heart.  Some  strange 
impulse  seemed  to  act  upon  the  soul  of  the  braver 
and  bolder  Europeans;  and  they  moved  westward, 
nor  could  have  helped  that  had  they  tried.  They 
lived  largely  and  blithely,  and  died  handsomely, 
those  old  Elizabethan  adventurers,  and  they  lie 
today  in  thousands  of  unrecorded  graves  upon 
two  continents,  each  having  found  out  that  any 
place  is  good  enough  for  a  man  to  die  upon,  pro- 
vided that  he  be  a  man. 

The  American  frontier  was  Elizabethan  in  its 
quality  —  childlike,  simple,  and  savage.  It  has 
not  entirely  passed;  for  both  Elizabethan  folk  and 
Elizabethan  customs  are  yet  to  be  found  in  the 
United  States.  While  the  half-savage  civiliza- 
tion of  the  farther  West  was  roaring  on  its  way 
across  the  continent  —  while  the  day  of  the  keel- 
boatman  and  the  plainsman,  of  the  Indian-fighter 
and  the  miner,  even  the  day  of  the  cowboy,  was 
dawning  and  setting  —  there  still  was  a  frontier 
left  far  behind  in  the  East,  near  the  top  of  the 
mountain  range  which  made  the  first  great  barrier 
across  our  pathway  to  the  West.  That  frontier, 
the  frontier  of  Boone  and  Kenton,  of  Robertson 
and  Sevier,  still  exists  and  may  be  seen  in  the 
Cumberlands  —  the  only  remaining  part  of  Amer- 


THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY  5 

ica  which  is  all  American.  There  we  may  find 
trace  of  the  Elizabethan  Age  —  idioms  lost  from 
English  literature  and  American  speech  long  ago. 
There  we  may  see  the  American  home  life  as  it 
went  on  more  than  a  hundred  years  ago.  We 
may  see  hanging  on  the  wall  the  long  muzzle- 
loading  rifle  of  an  earlier  day.  We  may  see  the 
spinning-wheel  and  the  loom.  The  women  still 
make  in  part  the  clothing  for  their  families,  and 
the  men  still  make  their  own  household  furniture, 
their  own  farming  implements,  their  own  boots. 

This  overhanging  frontier  of  America  is  a  true 
survival  of  the  days  of  Drake  as  well  as  of  the  days 
of  Boone.  The  people  are  at  once  godly  and 
savage.  They  breed  freely ;  they  love  their  homes ; 
they  are  ever  ready  for  adventure;  they  are  fru- 
gal, abstemious,  but  violent  and  strong.  They 
carry  on  still  the  half -religious  blood  feuds  of  the 
old  Scotch  Highlands  or  the  North  of  Ireland, 
whence  they  came.  They  reverence  good  women. 
They  care  little  for  material  accumulations.  They 
believe  in  personal  ease  and  personal  independ- 
ence. With  them  life  goes  on  not  in  the  slow 
monotony  of  reiterated  performance,  but  in  rag- 
ged profile,  with  large  exertions  followed  by  large 
repose.  Now  that  has  been  the  fashion  of  the 


6         THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

frontier  in  every  age  and  every  land  of  all  the 
world.  And  so,  by  studying  these  people,  we 
may  even  yet  arrive  at  a  just  and  comprehen- 
sive notion  of  what  we  might  call  the  "feel"  of 
the  old  frontier. 

There  exists,  too,  yet  another  Saxon  frontier 
in  a  far-off  portion  of  the  world.  In  that  strange 
country,  Australia,  tremendous  unknown  regions 
still  remain,  and  the  wild  pastoral  life  of  such 
regions  bids  fair  to  exist  yet  for  many  years.  A 
cattle  king  of  Queensland  held  at  one  time  sixty 
thousand  square  miles  of  land.  It  is  said  that  the 
average  size  of  pastoral  holdings  in  the  northern 
territory  of  Australia  is  two  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  thousand  acres.  Does  this  not  recall  the  old 
times  of  free  range  in  the  American  West? 

This  strange  antipodal  civilization  also  retains 
a  curious  flavor  of  Elizabethan  ideas.  It  does  not 
plan  for  inordinate  fortunes,  the  continual  amass- 
ing of  money,  but  it  does  deliberately  plan  for 
the  use  by  the  individual  of  his  individual  life. 
Australian  business  hours  are  shorter  than  Ameri- 
can. Routine  is  less  general.  The  individual  takes 
upon  himself  a  smaller  load  of  effort.  He  is  res- 
tive under  monotony.  He  sets  aside  a  great  part 
of  his  life  for  sport.  He  lives  in  a  large  and  young 


THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY  7 

day  of  the  world.  Here  we  may  see  a  remote 
picture  of  our  own  American  West  —  better,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  than  that  reflected  in  the  rapid  and 
wholly  commercialized  development  of  Western 
Canada,  which  is  not  flavored  by  any  age  but 
this. 

But  much  of  the  frontier  of  Australia  is  occupied 
by  men  of  means  who  had  behind  them  govern- 
ment aid  and  a  semi-paternal  encouragement  in 
their  adventures.  The  same  is  true  in  part  of 
the  government-fostered  settlement  of  Western 
Canada.  It  was  not  so  with  the  American  West. 
Here  was  not  the  place  of  the  rich  man  but  of  the 
poor  man,  and  he  had  no  one  to  aid  him  or  encour- 
age him.  Perhaps  no  man  ever  understood  the 
American  West  who  did  not  himself  go  there  and 
make  his  living  in  that  country,  as  did  the  men 
who  found  it  and  held  it  first.  Each  life  on 
our  old  frontier  was  a  personal  adventure.  The 
individual  had  no  government  behind  him  and 
he  lacked  even  the  protection  of  any  law. 

Our  frontier  crawled  west  from  the  first  sea- 
port settlements,  afoot,  on  horseback,  in  barges, 
or  with  slow  wagon-trains.  It  crawled  across  the 
Alleghanies,  down  the  great  river  valleys  and  up 
them  yet  again;  and  at  last,  in  days  of  new  trans- 


8         THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

portation,  it  leaped  across  divides,  from  one  rivet 
valley  to  another.  Its  history,  at  first  so  halting, 
came  to  be  very  swift  —  so  swift  that  it  worked 
great  elisions  in  its  own  story. 

In  our  own  day,  however,  the  Old  West  gener- 
ally means  the  old  cow  country  of  the  West  —  the 
high  plains  and  the  lower  foothills  running  from 
the  Rio  Grande  to  the  northern  boundary.  The 
still  more  ancient  cattle-range  of  the  lower  Pacific 
Slope  will  never  come  into  acceptance  as  the  Old 
West.  Always,  when  we  use  these  words,  we 
think  of  buffalo  plains  and  of  Indians,  and  of 
their  passing  before  the  footmen  and  riders  who 
carried  the  phantom  flag  of  Drake  and  the  Vir- 
gin Queen  from  the  Appalachians  to  the  Rockies 
—  before  the  men  who  eventually  made  good 
that  glorious  and  vaunting  vision  of  the  Virginia 
cavaliers,  whose  party  turned  back  from  the 
Rockfish  Gap  after  laying  claim  in  the  name  of 
King  George  on  all  the  country  lying  west  of 
them,  as  far  as  the  South  Sea! 

The  American  cow  country  may  with  very  good 
logic  arrogate  to  itself  the  title  of  the  real  and 
typical  frontier  of  all  the  world.  We  call  the 
spirit  of  the  frontier  Elizabethan,  and  so  it  was; 
but  even  as  the  Elizabethan  Age  was  marked  by 


THE  FRONTIER  IN  HISTORY  9 

its  contact  with  the  Spanish  civilization  in  Eu- 
rope, on  the  high  seas,  and  in  both  the  Americas, 
so  the  last  frontier  of  the  American  West  also  was 
affected,  and  largely,  deeply,  by  Spanish  influence 
and  Spanish  customs.  The  very  phraseology  of 
range  work  bears  proof  of  this.  Scores  of  Span- 
ish words  are  written  indelibly  in  the  language  of 
the  Plains.  The  frontier  of  the  cow-range  never 
was  Saxon  alone. 

It  is  a  curious  fact  also,  seldom  if  ever  noted, 
that  this  Old  West  of  the  Plains  was  very  largely 
Southern  and  not  Northern  on  its  Saxon  side. 
No  States  so  much  as  Kentucky  and  Tennessee 
and,  later,  Missouri  —  daughters  of  Old  Virginia 
in  her  glory  —  contributed  to  the  forces  of  the 
frontiersmen.  Texas,  farther  to  the  south,  put 
her  stamp  indelibly  upon  the  entire  cattle  in- 
dustry of  the  West.  Visionary,  impractical,  rest- 
less, adventurous,  these  later  Elizabethan  heroes 
—  bowing  to  no  yoke,  insisting  on  their  own 
rights  and  scorning  often  the  laws  of  others,  yet 
careful  to  retain  the  best  and  most  advantageous 
customs  of  any  conquered  country  —  naturally 
came  from  those  nearest  Elizabethan  countries 
which  lay  abandoned  behind  them. 

If  the  atmosphere  of  the  Elizabethan  Age  still 


10       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

may  be  found  in  the  forgotten  Cumberlands,  let 
us  lay  claim  to  kinship  with  yonder  roystering 
heroes  of  a  gallant  day;  for  this  was  ever  the  at- 
mosphere of  our  own  frontier.  To  feel  again  the 
following  breezes  of  the  Golden  Hind,  or  see  again, 
floating  high  in  the  cloudless  skies,  the  sails  of  the 
Great  Armada,  was  the  privilege  of  Americans  for 
a  double  decade  within  the  memory  of  men  yet 
living,  in  that  country,  so  unfailingly  beloved, 
which  we  call  the  Old  West  of  America. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  RANGE 

WHEN,  in  1803,  those  two  immortal  youths,  Meri- 
wether  Lewis  and  William  Clark,  were  about  to 
go  forth  on  their  great  journey  across  the  conti- 
nent, they  were  admonished  by  Thomas  Jeffer- 
son that  they  would  in  all  likelihood  encounter 
in  their  travels,  living  and  stalking  about,  the 
mammoth  or  the  mastodon,  whose  bones  had  been 
found  in  the  great  salt-licks  of  Kentucky.  We 
smile  now  at  such  a  supposition;  yet  it  was  not 
unreasonable  then.  No  man  knew  that  tremend- 
ous country  that  lay  beyond  the  mouth  of  the 
Missouri. 

The  explorers  crossed  one  portion  of  a  vast  land 
which  was  like  to  nothing  they  had  ever  seen  — 
the  region  later  to  become  the  great  cattle-range 
of  America.  It  reached,  although  they  could 
know  nothing  of  that,  from  the  Spanish  possessions 

on  the  south  across  a  thousand  miles  of  short- 

ll 


12       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

grass  lands  to  the  present  Canadian  boundary 
line  —  which  certain  obdurate  American  souls  still 
say  ought  to  have  been  at  54°  40',  and  not  where 
it  is!  From  the  Rio  Grande  to  "Fifty-four 
forty,"  indeed,  would  have  made  nice  measure- 
ments for  the  Saxon  cattle-range. 

Little,  however,  was  the  value  of  this  land  un- 
derstood by  the  explorers;  and,  for  more  than 
half  a  century  afterwards,  it  commonly  was  sup- 
posed to  be  useless  for  the  occupation  of  white 
men  and  suitable  only  as  a  hunting-ground  for 
savage  tribes.  Most  of  us  can  remember  the 
school  maps  of  our  own  youth,  showing  a  vast 
region  marked,  vaguely,  "The  Great  American 
Desert,"  which  was  considered  hopeless  for  any 
human  industry,  but  much  of  which  has  since 
proved  as  rich  as  any  land  anywhere  on  the  globe. 

Perhaps  it  was  the  treeless  nature  of  the 
vast  Plains  which  carried  the  first  idea  of  their 
infertility.  When  the  first  settlers  of  Illinois 
and  Indiana  came  up  from  south  of  the  Ohio 
River  they  had  their  choice  of  timber  and  prairie 
lands.  Thinking  the  prairies  worthless  —  since 
land  which  could  not  raise  a  tree  certainly  could 
not  raise  crops — these  first  occupants  of  the  Mid- 
dle West  spent  a  generation  or  more,  axe  in  hand, 


THE  RANGE  13 

along  the  heavily  timbered  river-bottoms.  The 
prairies  were  long  in  settling.  No  one  then  could 
have  predicted  that  farm  lands  in  that  region 
would  be  worth  three  hundred  dollars  an  acre  or 
better,  and  that  these  prairies  of  the  Mississippi 
Valley  would,  in  a  few  generations,  be  studded 
with  great  towns  and  would  form  a  part  of  the 
granary  of  the  world. 

But,  if  our  early  explorers,  passing  beyond  the 
valley  of  the  Missouri,  found  valueless  the  region 
of  the  Plains  and  the  foothills,  not  so  the  wild 
creatures  or  the  savage  men  who  had  lived  there 
longer  than  science  records.  The  buffalo  then 
ranged  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  the  Athabaska, 
from  the  Missouri  to  the  Rockies,  and  beyond. 
No  one  seems  to  have  concluded  in  those  days 
that  there  was  after  all  slight  difference  between 
the  buffalo  and  the  domestic  ox.  The  native 
cattle,  however,  in  untold  thousands  and  millions, 
had  even  then  proved  beyond  peradventure  the 
sustaining  and  strengthening  nature  of  the  grasses 
of  the  Plains. 

Now,  each  creature,  even  of  human  species, 
must  adjust  itself  to  its  environment.  Having 
done  so,  commonly  it  is  disposed  to  love  that 
environment.  The  Eskimo  and  the  Zulu  each 


14       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

thinks  that  he  has  the  best  land  in  the  world. 
So  with  the  American  Indian,  who,  supported 
by  the  vast  herds  of  buffalo,  ranged  all  over  that 
tremendous  country  which  was  later  to  be  given 
over  to  the  white  man  with  his  domestic  cattle. 
No  freer  life  ever  was  lived  by  any  savages  than 
by  the  Horse  Indians  of  the  Plains  in  the  buffalo 
days;  and  never  has  the  world  known  a  physically 
higher  type  of  savage. 

On  the  buffalo-range  —  that  is  to  say,  on  the  cat- 
tle-range which  was  to  be  —  Lewis  and  Clark  met 
several  bands  of  the  Sioux  —  the  Mandans  and 
the  Assiniboines,  the  Blackfeet,  the  Shoshones. 
Farther  south  were  the  Pawnees,  the  Kaws,  the 
Otoes,  the  Osages,  most  of  whom  depended  in 
part  upon  the  buffalo  for  their  living,  though  the 
Otoes,  the  Pawnees,  the  Mandans,  and  certain 
others  now  and  then  raised  a  little  corn  or  a  few 
squashes  to  help  out  their  bill  of  fare.  Still 
farther  south  dwelt  the  Kiowas,  the  Comanches, 
and  others.  The  Arapahoes,  the  Cheyennes,  the 
Crows,  and  the  Utes,  all  hunters,  were  soon  to 
come  into  the  ken  of  the  white  man.  Of  such  of 
these  tribes  as  they  met,  the  youthful  captains 
made  accounting,  gravely  and  with  extraordinary 
accuracy,  but  without  discovering  in  this  region 


THE  RANGE  15 

much  future  for  Americans.     They  were  explorers 
and  not  industrial  investigators. 

It  was  nearly  half  a  century  after  the  jour- 
ney of  Lewis  and  Clark  that  the  Forty-Niners 
were  crossing  the  Plains,  whither,  meanwhile,  the 
Mormons  had  trekked  in  search  of  a  country 
where  they  might  live  as  they  liked.  Still  the 
wealth  of  the  Plains  remained  untouched.  Cali- 
fornia was  in  the  eyes  of  the  world.  The  great 
cow-range  was  overleaped.  But,  in  the  early 
fifties,  when  the  placer  fields  of  California  began 
to  be  less  numerous  and  less  rich,  the  half -savage 
population  of  the  mines  roared  on  northward, 
even  across  our  northern  line.  Soon  it  was  to  roll 
back.  Next  it  worked  east  and  southeast  and 
northeast  over  the  great  dry  plains  of  Washington 
and  Oregon,  so  that,  as  readily  may  be  seen,  the 
cow-range  proper  was  not  settled  as  most  of  the 
West  was,  by  a  directly  westbound  thrust  of  an 
eastern  population;  but,  on  the  contrary,  it  was 
approached  from  several  different  angles  —  from 
the  north,  from  the  east,  from  the  west  and 
northwest,  and  finally  from  the  south. 

The  early,  turbulent  population  of  miners  and 
adventurers  was  crude,  lawless,  and  aggressive. 
It  cared  nothing  whatever  for  the  Indian  tribes. 


16       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 
War,  instant  and  merciless,  where  it  meant  mur- 
der for  the  most  part,  was  set  on  foot  as  soon  as 
white  touched  red  in  that  far  western  region. 

All  these  new  white  men  who  had  crowded  into 
the  unknown  country  of  the  Plains,  the  Rockies, 
the  Sierras,  and  the  Cascades,  had  to  be  fed. 
They  could  not  employ  and  remain  content  with 
the  means  by  which  the  red  man  there  had  always 
fed  himself.  Hence  a  new  industry  sprang  up  in 
the  United  States,  which  of  itself  made  certain 
history  in  that  land.  The  business  of  freighting 
supplies  to  the  West,  whether  by  bull-train  or 
by  pack-train,  was  an  industry  sui  generis,  very 
highly  specialized,  and  pursued  by  men  of  great 
business  ability  as  well  as  by  men  of  great  hardi- 
hood and  daring. 

Each  of  these  freight  trains  which  went  West 
carried  hanging  on  its  flank  more  and  more  of  the 
white  men.  As  the  trains  returned,  more  and  more 
was  learned  in  the  States  of  the  new  country  which 
lay  between  the  Missouri  and  the  Rockies,  which 
ran  no  man  knew  how  far  north,  and  no  man  could 
guess  how  far  south.  Now  appears  in  history 
Fort  Benton,  on  the  Missouri,  the  great  northern 
supply  post  —  just  as  at  an  earlier  date  there  had 
appeared  Fort  Hall,  one  of  the  old  fur-trading 


THE  RANGE  17 

posts  beyond  the  Rockies,  Bent's  Fort  on  the 
Arkansas,  and  many  other  outposts  of  the  new 
Saxon  civilization  in  the  West. 

Later  came  the  pony  express  and  the  stage  coach 
which  made  history  and  romance  for  a  generation. 
Feverishly,  boisterously,  a  strong,  rugged,  woman- 
less  population  crowded  westward  and  formed  the 
wavering,  now  advancing,  now  receding  line  of  the 
great  frontier  of  American  story. 

But  for  long  there  was  no  sign  of  permanent 
settlement  on  the  Plains,  and  no  one  thought  of 
this  region  as  the  frontier.  The  men  there  who 
were  prospecting  and  exploiting  were  classified 
as  no  more  than  adventurers.  No  one  seems  to 
have  taken  a  lesson  from  the  Indian  and  the 
buffalo.  The  reports  of  Fremont  long  since  had 
called  attention  to  the  nourishing  quality  of  those 
grasses  of  the  high  country,  but  the  day  of  the 
cowboy  had  not  yet  dawned.  There  is  a  some- 
what feeble  story  which  runs  to  the  effect  that 
in  1866  one  of  the  great  wagon-trains,  caught  by 
the  early  snows  of  winter,  was  obliged  to  abandon 
its  oxen  on  the  range.  It  was  supposed  that,  of 
course,  the  oxen  must  perish  during  the  winter. 
But  next  spring  the  owners  were  surprised  to  find 
that  the  oxen,  so  far  from  perishing,  had  flour- 


18       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ished  very  much  —  indeed,  were  fat  and  in  good 
condition.  So  runs  the  story  which  is  often  re- 
peated. It  may  be  true,  but  to  accredit  to  this 
incident  the  beginnings  of  the  cattle  industry  in 
the  Indian  country  would  surely  be  going  too 
far.  The  truth  is  that  the  cow  industry  was 
not  a  Saxon  discovery.  It  was  a  Latin  enter- 
prise, flourishing  in  Mexico  long  before  the  first 
of  these  miners  and  adventurers  came  on  the 
range. 

Something  was  known  of  the  Spanish  lands  to 
the  south  through  the  explorations  of  Pike,  but 
more  through  the  commerce  of  the  prairies  —  the 
old  wagon  trade  from  the  Missouri  River  to  the 
Spanish  cities  of  Sante  Fe  and  Chihuahua.  Now 
the  cow  business,  south  of  the  Rio  Grande,  was 
already  well  differentiated  and  developed  at  the 
time  the  first  adventurers  from  the  United  States 
went  into  Texas  and  began  to  crowd  their  Latin 
neighbors  for  more  room.  There  it  was  that  our 
Saxon  frontiersmen  first  discovered  the  cattle 
industry.  But  these  southern  and  northern  rifle- 
men—  ruthless  and  savage,  yet  strangely  states- 
manlike —  though  they  might  betimes  drive  away 
the  owners  of  the  herds,  troubled  little  about  the 
herds  themselves.  There  was  a  certain  fascina- 


THE  RANGE  19 

tion  to  these  rude  strangers  in  the  slow  and 
easeful  civilization  of  Old  Spain  which  they  en- 
countered in  the  land  below  them.  Little  by 
little,  and  then  largely  and  yet  more  largely,  the 
warriors  of  San  Jacinto  reached  out  and  began 
to  claim  lands  for  themselves  —  leagues  and  un- 
counted leagues  of  land,  which  had,  however,  no 
market  value.  Well  within  the  memory  of  the 
present  generation  large  tracts  of  good  land  were 
bought  in  Texas  for  six  cents  an  acre;  some  was 
bought  for  half  that  price  in  a  time  not  much 
earlier.  Today  much  of  that  land  is  producing 
wealth;  but  land  then  was  worthless  —  and  so 
were  cows. 

This  civilization  of  the  Southwest,  of  the  new 
Republic  of  Texas,  may  be  regarded  as  the  first 
enduring  American  result  of  contact  with  the 
Spanish  industry.  The  men  who  won  Texas  came 
mostly  from  Kentucky  and  Tennessee  or  southern 
Ohio,  and  the  first  colonizer  of  Texas  was  a  Virgin- 
ian, Stephen  Fuller  Austin.  They  came  along  the 
old  Natchez  Trace  from  Nashville  to  the  Missis- 
sippi River  —  that  highway  which  has  so  much 
history  of  its  own.  Down  this  old  winding  trail 
into  the  greatest  valley  of  all  the  world,  and  beyond 
that  valley  out  into  the  Spanish  country,  moved 


20       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

steadily  the  adventurers  whose  fathers  had  but 
recently  crossed  the  Appalachians.  One  of  the 
strongest  thrusts  of  the  American  civilization 
thus  entered  the  cattle-range  at  its  lower  end, 
between  the  Rio  Grande  and  the  Red  River. 

In  all  the  several  activities,  mining,  freighting, 
scouting,  soldiering,  riding  pony  express,  or  even 
sheer  adventuring  for  what  might  come,  there 
was  ever  a  trading  back  and  forth  between  home- 
staying  men  and  adventuring  men.  Thus  there 
was  an  interchange  of  knowledge  and  of  customs 
between  East  and  West,  between  our  old  country 
and  our  new.  There  was  an  interchange,  too,  at 
the  south,  where  our  Saxon  civilization  came  in 
touch  with  that  of  Mexico. 

We  have  now  to  note  some  fundamental  facts 
and  principles  of  the  cattle  industry  which  our 
American  cattlemen  took  over  ready-made  from 
the  hands  of  Mexico. 

The  Mexicans  in  Texas  had  an  abundance  of 
small,  hardy  horses  of  African  and  Spanish  breed, 
which  Spain  had  brought  into  the  New  World  — 
the  same  horses  that  the  Moors  had  brought  into 
Spain  —  a  breed  naturally  hardy  and  able  to  sub- 
sist upon  dry  food.  Without  such  horses  there 


THE  RANGE  21 

could  have  been  no  cattle  industry.  These 
horses,  running  wild  in  herds,  had  crossed  to  the 
upper  Plains.  La  Verendrye,  and  later  Lewis 
and  Clark,  had  found  the  Indians  using  horses 
in  the  north.  The  Indians,  as  we  have  seen,  had 
learned  to  manage  the  horse.  Formerly  they  had 
used  dogs  to  drag  the  travois,  but  now  they  used 
the  "elk-dog,"  as  they  first  called  the  horse. 

In  the  original  cow  country,  that  is,  in  Mexico 
and  Texas,  countless  herds  of  cattle  were  held  in 
a  loose  sort  of  ownership  over  wide  and  unknown 
plains.  Like  all  wild  animals  in  that  warm 
country,  they  bred  in  extraordinary  numbers. 
The  southern  range,  indeed,  has  always  been 
called  the  breeding  range.  The  cattle  had  little 
value.  He  who  wanted  beef  killed  beef.  He  who 
wanted  leather  killed  cattle  for  their  hides.  But 
beyond  these  scant  and  infrequent  uses  cattle 
had  no  definite  value. 

The  Mexican,  however,  knew  how  to  handle 
cows.  He  could  ride  a  horse,  and  he  could  rope 
cattle  and  brand  them.  Most  of  the  cattle  of  a 
wide  range  would  go  to  certain  water-holes  more 
or  less  regularly,  where  they  might  be  roughly 
collected  or  estimated.  This  coming  of  the  cattle 
to  the  watering-places  made  it  unnecessary  for 


22  THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 
owners  of  cattle  to  acquire  ranch  land.  It  was 
enough  to  secure  the  water-front  where  the  cows 
must  go  to  drink.  That  gave  the  owner  all  the 
title  he  needed.  His  right  to  the  increase  he  could 
prove  by  another  phenomenon  of  nature,  just  as 
inevitable  and  invariable  as  that  of  thirst.  The 
maternal  instinct  of  a  cow  and  the  dependence  of 
the  calf  upon  its  mother  gave  the  old  rancher  of 
immemorial  times  sufficient  proof  of  ownership 
in  the  increase  of  his  herd.  The  calf  would  run 
with  its  own  mother  and  with  no  other  cow  through 
its  first  season.  So  that  if  an  old  Mexican  ranchero 
saw  a  certain  number  of  cows  at  his  watering- 
places,  and  with  them  calves,  he  knew  that  all 
before  him  were  his  property — or,  at  least,  he 
claimed  them  as  such  and  used  them. 

Still,  this  was  loose-footed  property.  It  might 
stray  away  after  all,  or  it  might  be  driven  away. 
Hence,  in  some  forgotten  time,  our  shrewd  Span- 
iard invented  a  system  of  proof  of  ownership 
which  has  always  lain  at  the  very  bottom  of  the 
organized  cow  industry;  he  invented  the  method 
of  branding.  This  meant  his  sign,  his  name,  his 
trade-mark,  his  proof  of  ownership.  The  animal 
could  not  shake  it  off.  It  would  not  burn  off  in 
the  sun  or  wash  off  in  the  rain.  It  went  with  the 


THE  RANGE  23 

animal  and  could  not  be  eradicated  from  the 
animal's  hide.  Wherever  the  bearer  was  seen, 
the  brand  upon  its  hide  provided  certain  identi- 
fication of  the  owner. 

Now,  all  these  basic  ideas  of  the  cow  indus- 
try were  old  on  the  lower  range  in  Texas  when 
our  white  men  first  drifted  thither.  The  cattle 
industry,  although  in  its  infancy,  and  although 
supposed  to  have  no  great  future,  was  developed 
long  before  Texas  became  a  republic.  It  never, 
indeed,  changed  very  much  from  that  time  until 
the  end  of  its  own  career. 

One  great  principle  was  accepted  religiously  even 
in  those  early  and  crude  days.  A  man's  cow  was 
his  cow.  A  man's  brand  was  his  brand.  There 
must  be  no  interference  with  his  ownership.  Hence 
certain  other  phases  of  the  industry  followed  in- 
evitably. These  cattle,  these  calves,  each  branded 
by  the  iron  of  the  owner,  in  spite  of  all  precau- 
tions, began  to  mingle  as  settlers  became  more 
numerous;  hence  came  the  idea  of  the  round-up. 
The  country  was  warm  and  lazy.  If  a  hundred 
or  a  thousand  cows  were  not  collected,  very  well. 
If  a  calf  were  separated  from  its  mother,  very 
well.  The  old  ranchers  never  quarreled  among 
themselves.  They  never  would  have  made  in  the 


24       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

\ 

South  anything  like  a  cattle  association;  it  was 
left  for  the  Yankees  to  do  that  at  a  time  when 
cows  had  come  to  have  far  greater  values.  There 
were  few  arguments  in  the  first  rodeos  of  the  lower 
range.  One  rancher  would  vie  with  his  neighbor 
in  generosity  in  the  matter  of  unbranded  calves. 
Haggling  would  have  been  held  contemptible.  On 
the  lower  range  in  the  old  times  no  one  cared 
much  about  a  cow.  Why  should  one  do  so?  There 
was  no  market  for  cows  —  no  one  who  wished  to 
buy  them.  If  one  tendered  a  Mexican  cinquo 
pesos  for  a  yearling  or  a  two-year-old,  the  owner 
might  perhaps  offer  the  animal  as  a  gift,  or  he 
might  smile  and  say  "Con  mucha  gusto"  as  he 
was  handed  a  few  pieces  of  silver.  There  were 
plenty  of  cows  everywhere  in  the  world! 

Let  us,  therefore,  give  the  old  Spaniard  full 
credit  falike  in  picturesque  romance  and  in  the 
organized  industry  of  the  cow.  The  westbound 
thrust  which  came  upon  the  upper  part  of  the 
range  in  the  days  of  more  shrewd  and  exact- 
ing business  methods  was  simply  the  best-known 
and  most  published  phase  of  frontier  life  in  the 
cow  country;  hence  we  have  usually  accepted  it 
as  typical.  It  would  not  be  accurate  to  say  that 
the  cattle  industry  was  basically  much  influenced 


THE  RANGE  25 

or  governed  by  northern  or  eastern  men.  In 
practically  all  of  its  great  phenomena  the  frontier 
of  the  old  cow-range  was  southern  by  birth  and 
growth. 

There  lay,  then,  so  long  unused,  that  vast  and 
splendid  land  so  soon  to  write  romantic  history  of 
its  own,  so  soon  to  come  into  the  admiration  or 
the  wonder  of  a  great  portion  of  the  earth  —  a 
land  of  fascinating  interest  to  the  youth  of  every 
country,  and  a  region  whose  story  holds  a  charm 
for  young  and  old  alike  even  today.  It  was  a 
region  royal  in  its  dimensions.  Far  on  the  west 
it  was  hedged  by  the  gray-sided  and  white- 
topped  mountains,  the  Rockies.  Where  the  buf- 
falo once  lived,  the  cattle  were  to  live,  high  up 
in  the  foothills  of  this  great  mountain  range 
which  ran  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  Canada. 
On  the  east,  where  lay  the  Prairies  rather  than 
the  Plains,  it  was  a  country  waving  with  high 
native  grasses,  with  many  brilliant  flowers  hiding 
among  them,  the  sweet-william,  the  wild  rose,  and 
often  great  masses  of  the  yellow  sunflower. 

From  the  Rio  Grande  to  the  Athabaska,  for 
the  greater  part,  the  frontier  sky  was  blue  and 
cloudless  during  most  of  the  year.  The  rainfall 


£6       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

was  not  great.  The  atmosphere  was  dry.  It 
was  a  cheerful  country,  one  of  optimism  and 
not  of  gloom.  In  the  extreme  south,  along  the 
Rio  Grande,  the  climate  was  moister,  warmer, 
more  enervating;  but  on  the  high  steppes  of  the 
middle  range  in  Colorado,  Wyoming,  Montana, 
western  Nebraska,  there  lay  the  finest  out-of- 
doors  country,  man's  country  the  finest  of  the 
earth. 

But  for  the  time,  busy  with  more  accustomed 
things,  mining  and  freighting  and  fighting  and 
hunting  and  trading  and  trapping,  we  Americans 
who  had  arrived  upon  the  range  cared  little  for 
cows.  The  upper  thrust  of  the  great  herds  from 
the  south  into  the  north  had  not  begun.  It  was 
after  the  Civil  War  that  the  first  great  drives  of 
cattle  from  the  south  toward  the  north  began, 
and  after  men  had  learned  in  the  State  of  Texas 
that  cattle  moved  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  the 
upper  portions  of  the  State  and  fed  on  the  mes- 
quite  grass  would  attain  greater  stature  than  in 
the  hot  coast  country.  Then  swiftly,  somewhat 
luridly,  there  leaped  into  our  comprehension  and 
our  interest  that  strange  country  long  loosely 
held  under  our  flag,  the  region  of  the  Plains,  the 
region  which  we  now  call  the  Old  West. 


THE  RANGE  27 

In  great  bands,  in  long  lines,  slowly,  low- 
headed,  sore-footed,  the  vast  gatherings  of  the 
prolific  lower  range  moved  north,  each  cow  with 
its  title  indelibly  marked  upon  its  hide.  These 
cattle  were  now  going  to  take  the  place  of  those 
on  which  the  Indians  had  depended  for  their  liv- 
ing these  many  years.  A  new  day  in  American 
history  had  dawned. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  CATTLE  TRAILS 

THE  customary  method  of  studying  history  by 
means  of  a  series  of  events  and  dates  is  not  the 
method  which  we  have  chosen  to  employ  in  this 
study  of  the  Old  West.  Speaking  generally,  our 
minds  are  unable  to  assimilate  a  condensed  mass 
of  events  and  dates;  and  that  is  precisely  what 
would  be  required  of  us  if  we  should  attempt  here 
to  follow  the  ways  of  conventional  history.  Dates 
are  at  best  no  more  than  milestones  on  the  path- 
way of  time;  and  in  the  present  instance  it  is  not 
the  milestones  but  the  road  itself  with  which  we 
are  concerned.  Where  does  the  road  begin?  Why 
comes  it  hither  ?  Whither  does  it  lead  ?  These  are 
the  real  questions. 

Under  all  the  exuberance  of  the  life  of  the  range 
there  lay  a  steady  business  of  tremendous  size 
and  enormous  values.  The  "uproarious  iniquity  " 
of  the  West,  its  picturesqueness,  its  vividness  — 

28 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  29 

these  were  but  froth  on  the  stream.  The  stream 
itself  was  a  steady  and  somber  flood.  Beyond 
this  picturesqueness  of  environment  very  few  have 
cared  to  go,  and  therefore  sometimes  have  had 
little  realization  of  the  vastness  of  the  cowboy's 
kingdom,  the  "magnitude  of  the  interests  in  his 
care,  or  the  fortitude,  resolution,  and  instant 
readiness  essential  to  his  daily  life."  The  Ameri- 
can cowboy  is  the  most  modern  representative  of 
a  human  industry  that  is  second  to  very  few  in 
antiquity. 

Virgil  strikes  the  note  of  real  history:  Quorum 
pars  magnafui,  says  JSneas —  "Of  which  I  was  a 
great  part."  If  we  seek  the  actual  truth,  we  ought 
most  to  value  contemporary  records,  representa- 
tions made  by  men  who  were  themselves  a  part 
of  the  scenes  which  they  describe.  In  that  way 
we  shall  arrive  not  merely  upon  lurid  events, 
not  alone  upon  the  stereotyped  characters  of  the 
"Wild  West,"  but  upon  causes  which  are  much 
more  interesting  and  immensely  more  valuable 
than  any  merely  titillating  stories  from  the 
weirdly  illustrated  Apocrypha  of  the  West.  We 
must  go  below  such  things  if  we  would  gain  a 
just  and  lasting  estimate  of  the  limes.  We  ought 
to  look  on  the  old  range  neither  as  a  playground 


30       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

of  idle  men  nor  as  a  scene  of  hysterical  and 
contorted  human  activities.  We  ought  to  look 
upon  it  from  the  point  of  view  of  its  uses  to 
mankind.  The  explorers  found  it  a  wilderness, 
the  home  of  the  red  man  and  the  buffalo.  What 
were  the  underlying  causes  of  its  settlement  and 
development? 

There  is  in  history  no  agency  so  wondrous  in 
events,  no  working  instrumentality  so  great  as 
transportation.  The  great  seeking  of  all  human 
life  is  to  find  its  level.  Perhaps  the  first  men 
traveled  by  hollowed  logs  down  stream.  Then 
possibly  the  idea  of  a  sail  was  conceived.  Early 
in  the  story  of  the  United  States  men  made  com- 
mercial journeys  from  the  head  of  the  Ohio  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Mississippi  by  flatboats,  and  came 
back  by  keelboats.  The  pole,  the  cordelle,  the 
paddle,  and  the  sail,  in  turn  helped  them  to  navi- 
gate the  great  streams  which  led  out  into  the 
West.  And  presently  there  was  to  come  that  tre- 
mendous upheaval  wrought  by  the  advent  of  the 
iron  trails  which,  scorning  alike  waterways  and 
mountain  ranges,  flung  themselves  almost  directly 
westward  across  the  continent. 

The  iron  trails,  crossing  the  northern  range  soon 
after  the  Civil  War,  brought  a  market  to  the  cattle 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  31 

country.  Inevitably  the  men  of  the  lower  range 
would  seek  to  reach  the  railroads  with  what 
they  had  to  sell  —  their  greatest  natural  product, 
cattle  on  the  hoof.  This  was  the  primary  cause 
of  the  great  northbound  drives  already  men- 
tioned, the  greatest  pastoral  phenomena  in  the 
story  of  the  world. 

The  southern  herds  at  that  time  had  no  market 
at  their  doors.  They  had  to  go  to  the  market,  and 
they  had  to  go  on  foot.  That  meant  that  they 
must  be  driven  northward  by  cattle  handlers  who 
had  passed  their  days  in  the  wild  life  of  the  lower 
range.  These  cowmen  of  course  took  their  char- 
acter and  their  customs  northward  with  them,  and 
so  they  were  discovered  by  those  enthusiastic  ob- 
servers, newly  arrived  by  rail,  whom  the  cowmen 
were  wont  to  call  "pilgrims." 

Now  the  trail  of  the  great  cattle  drives  —  the 
Long  Trail  —  was  a  thing  of  tremendous  impor- 
tance of  itself  and  it  is  still  full  of  interest.  As 
it  may  not  easily  be  possible  for  the  author  to 
better  a  description  of  it  that  was  written  some 
twenty  years  ago,  that  description  is  here  again 
set  down.1 

1  The  Story  of  the  Cowboy,  by  E.  Hough.  Appleton.  1897.  Re- 
printed by  permission. 


32       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

The  braiding  of  a  hundred  minor  pathways,  the 
Long  Trail  lay  like  a  vast  rope  connecting  the 
cattle  country  of  the  South  with  that  of  the 
North.  Lying  loose  or  coiling,  it  ran  for  more 
than  two  thousand  miles  along  the  eastern  edge 
of  the  Rocky  Mountains,  sometimes  close  in  at 
their  feet,  again  hundreds  of  miles  away  across 
the  hard  tablelands  or  the  well-flowered  prairies. 
It  traversed  in  a  fair  line  the  vast  land  of  Texas, 
curled  over  the  Indian  Nations,  over  Kansas, 
Colorado,  Nebraska,  Wyoming,  and  Montana, 
and  bent  in  wide  overlapping  circles  as  far  west 
as  Utah  and  Nevada;  as  far  east  as  Missouri, 
Iowa,  even  Illinois;  and  as  far  north  as  the 
British  possessions.  Even  today  you  may  trace 
plainly  its  former  course,  from  its  faint  begin- 
nings in  the  lazy  land  of  Mexico,  the  Ararat  of 
the  cattle-range.  It  is  distinct  across  Texas, 
and  multifold  still  in  the  Indian  lands.  Its 
many  intermingling  paths  still  scar  the  iron  sur- 
face of  the  Neutral  Strip,  and  the  plows  have  not 
buried  all  the  old  furrows  in  the  plains  of  Kansas. 
Parts  of  the  path  still  remain  visible  in  the  moun- 
tain lands  of  the  far  North.  You  may  see  the 
ribbons  banding  the  hillsides  today  along  the 
valley  of  the  Stillwater,  and  along  the  Yellow- 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  33 

stone  and  toward  the  source  of  the  Missouri. 
The  hoof  marks  are  beyond  the  Musselshell, 
over  the  Bad  Lands  and  the  coulees  and  the 
flat  prairies;  and  far  up  into  the  land  of  the 
long  cold  you  may  see,  even  today  if  you  like, 
the  shadow  of  that  unparalleled  pathway,  the 
Long  Trail  of  the  cattle-range.  History  has  no 
other  like  it. 

The  Long  Trail  was  surveyed  and  constructed  in 
a  century  and  a  day.  Over  the  Red  River  of  the 
South,  a  stream  even  today  perhaps  known  but 
vaguely  in  the  minds  of  many  inhabitants  of  the 
country,  there  appeared,  almost  without  warning, 
vast  processions  of  strange  horned  kine  —  proces- 
sions of  enormous  wealth,  owned  by  kings  who 
paid  no  tribute,  and  guarded  by  men  who  never 
knew  a  master.  Whither  these  were  bound,  what 
had  conjured  them  forth,  whence  they  came,  were 
questions  in  the  minds  of  the  majority  of  the 
population  of  the  North  and  East  to  whom  the 
phenomenon  appeared  as  the  product  of  a  day. 
The  answer  to  these  questions  lay  deep  in  the  laws 
of  civilization,  and  extended  far  back  into  that 
civilization's  history.  The  Long  Trail  was  fin- 
ished in  a  day.  It  was  begun  more  than  a  cen- 
tury before  that  day,  and  came  forward  along  the 


34       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

very  appointed  ways  of  time ....  Thus,  far 
down  in  the  vague  Southwest,  at  some  distant 
time,  in  some  distant  portion  of  old,  mysterious 
Mexico,  there  fell  into  line  the  hoof  prints  which 
made  the  first  faint  beginnings  of  the  Long  Trail, 
merely  the  path  of  a  half  nomadic  movement 
along  the  line  of  the  least  resistance. 

The  Long  Trail  began  to  deepen  and  extend. 
It  received  then,  as  it  did  later,  a  baptism  of  human 
blood  such  as  no  other  pathway  of  the  continent 
has  known.  The  nomadic  and  the  warlike  days 
passed,  and  there  ensued  a  more  quiet  and  pas- 
toral time.  It  was  the  beginning  of  a  feudalism 
of  the  range,  a  barony  rude  enough,  but  a  glorious 
one,  albeit  it  began,  like  all  feudalism,  in  large- 
handed  theft  and  generous  murdering.  The  flocks 
of  these  strong  men,  carelessly  interlapping,  in- 
creased and  multiplied  amazingly.  They  were 
hardly  looked  upon  as  wealth.  The  people  could 
not  eat  a  tithe  of  the  beef;  they  could  not  use  a 
hundredth  of  the  leather.  Over  hundreds  and 
hundreds  of  miles  of  ownerless  grass  lands,  by 
the  rapid  waters  of  the  mountains,  by  the  slow 
streams  of  the  plains  or  the  long  and  dark  lagoons 
of  the  low  coast  country,"  the  herds  of  tens  grew 
into  droves  of  hundreds  and  thousands  and  hun- 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  35 

dreds  of  thousands.  This  was  really  the  dawning 
of  the  American  cattle  industry. 

Chips  and  flakes  of  the  great  Southwestern  herd 
began  to  be  seen  in  the  Northern  States.  As  early 
as  1857  Texas  cattle  were  driven  to  Illinois.  In 
1861  Louisiana  was,  without  success,  tried  as  an 
outlet.  In  1867  a  venturous  drover  took  a  herd 
across  the  Indian  Nations,  bound  for  California, 
and  only  abandoned  the  project  because  the  Plains 
Indians  were  then  very  bad  in  the  country  to  the 
north.  In  1869  several  herds  were  driven  from 
Texas  to  Nevada.  These  were  side  trails  of  the 
main  cattle  road.  It  seemed  clear  that  a  great 
population  in  the  North  needed  the  cheap  beef  of 
Texas,  and  the  main  question  appeared  to  be 
one  of  transportation.  No  proper  means  for  this 
offered.  The  Civil  War  stopped  almost  all  plans 
to  market  the  range  cattle,  and  the  close  of  that 
war  found  the  vast  grazing  lands  of  Texas  covered 
fairly  with  millions  of  cattle  which  had  no  actual 
or  determinate  value.  They  were  sorted  and 
branded  and  herded  after  a  fashion,  but  neither 
they  nor  their  increase  could  be  converted  into 
anything  but  more  cattle.  The  cry  for  a  market 
became  imperative. 

Meantime  the  Anglo-Saxon  civilization  was  roll- 


36       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ing  swiftly  toward  the  upper  West.  The  Indians 
were  being  driven  from  the  Plains.  A  solid  army 
was  pressing  behind  the  vanguard  of  soldier, 
scout,  and  plainsman.  The  railroads  were  push- 
ing out  into  a  new  and  untracked  empire.  They 
carried  the  market  with  them.  The  market 
halted,  much  nearer,  though  still  some  hundred 
of  miles  to  the  north  of  the  great  herd.  The 
Long  Trail  tapped  no  more  at  the  door  of  Illinois, 
Missouri,  Arkansas,  but  leaped  north  again  defi- 
nitely, this  time  springing  across  the  Red  River 
and  up  to  the  railroads,  along  sharp  and  well- 
defined  channels  deepened  in  the  year  of  1866 
alone  by  the  hoofs  of  more  than  a  quarter  of  a 
million  cattle. 

In  1871,  only  five  years  later,  over  six  hundred 
thousand  cattle  crossed  the  Red  River  for  the 
Northern  markets.  Abilene,  Newton,  Wichita, 
Ellsworth,  Great  Bend,  Dodge,  flared  out  into  a 
swift  and  sometime  evil  blossoming.  Thus  the 
men  of  the  North  first  came  to  hear  of  the  Long 
Trail  and  the  men  who  made  it,  although  really 
it  had  begun  long  ago  and  had  been  foreordained 
to  grow. 

By  this  time,  1867  and  1868,  the  northern  por- 
tions of  the  region  immediately  to  the  east  of  the 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  37 

Rocky  Mountains  had  been  sufficiently  cleared  of 
their  wild  inhabitants  to  admit  a  gradual  though 
precarious  settlement.  It  had  been  learned  yet 
again  that  the  buffalo  grass  and  the  sweet  waters 
of  the  far  North  would  fatten  a  range  broadhorn 
to  a  stature  far  beyond  any  it  could  attain  on  the 
southern  range.  The  Long  Trail  pushed  rapidly 
even  farther  to  the  north  where  there  still  remained 
"free  grass"  and  a  new  market.  The  territorial 
ranges  needed  many  thousands  of  cattle  for  their 
stocking,  and  this  demand  took  a  large  part  of  the 
Texas  drive  which  came  to  Abilene,  Great  Bend, 
and  Fort  Dodge.  Moreover,  the  Government  was 
now  feeding  thousands  of  its  new  red  wards,  and 
these  Indians  needed  thousands  of  beeves  for  ra- 
tions, which  were  driven  from  the  southern  range 
to  the  upper  army  posts  and  reservations.  Be- 
tween this  Government  demand  and  that  of  the 
territorial  stock  ranges  there  was  occupation  for 
the  men  who  made  the  saddle  their  home. 

The  Long  Trail,  which  had  previously  found 
the  black  corn  lands  of  Illinois  and  Missouri,  now 
crowded  to  the  West,  until  it  had  reached  Utah 
and  Nevada,  and  penetrated  every  open  park  and 
mesa  and  valley  of  Colorado,  and  found  all  the 
high  plains  of  Wyoming.  Cheyenne  and  Laramie 


38       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

became  common  words  now,  and  drovers  spoke 
as  wisely  of  the  dangers  of  the  Platte  as  a  year 
before  they  had  mentioned  those  of  the  Red  River 
or  the  Arkansas.  Nor  did  the  Trail  pause  in  its 
irresistible  push  to  the  north  until  it  had  found  the 
last  of  the  five  great  transcontinental  lines,  far  in 
the  British  provinces.  Here  in  spite  of  a  long  sea- 
son of  ice  and  snow  the  uttermost  edges  of  the 
great  herd  might  survive,  in  a  certain  percentage 
at  least,  each  year  in  an  almost  unassisted  struggle 
for  existence,  under  conditions  different  enough, 
it  would  seem,  from  those  obtaining  at  the  op- 
posite extreme  of  the  wild  roadway  over  which 
they  came. 

The  Long  Trail  of  the  cattle-range  was  done! 
By  magic  the  cattle  industry  had  spread  over  the 
entire  West.  Today  many  men  think  of  that  in- 
dustry as  belonging  only  to  the  Southwest,  and 
many  would  consider  that  it  was  transferred  to 
the  North.  Really  it  was,  not  transferred  but 
extended,  and  the  trail  of  the  old  drive  marks 
the  line  of  that  extension. 

Today  the  Long  Trail  is  replaced  by  other 
trails,  product  of  the  swift  development  of  the 
West,  and  it  remains  as  the  connection,  now  for 
the  most  part  historical  only,  between  two  phases 


THE  CATTLE  TRAILS  39 

of  an  industry  which,  in  spite  of  differences  of 
climate  and  condition,  retain  a  similarity  in  all 
essential  features.  When  the  last  steer  of  the 
first  herd  -was  driven  into  the  corral  at  the  Ul- 
tima Thule  of  the  range,  it  was  the  pony  of  the 
American  cowboy  which  squatted  and  wheeled 
under  the  spur  and  burst  down  the  straggling 
street  of  the  little  frontier  town.  Before  that 
time,  and  since  that  time,  it  was  and  has  been 
the  same  pony  and  the  same  man  who  have 
traveled  the  range,  guarding  and  guiding  the 
wild  herds,  from  the  romantic  to  the  common- 
place days  of  the  West.. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   COWBOY 

THE  Great  West,  vast  and  rude,  brought  forth  men 
also  vast  and  rude.  We  pass  today  over  parts  of 
that  matchless  region,  and  we  see  the  red  hills  and 
ragged  mountain-fronts  cut  and  crushed  into  huge 
indefinite  shapes,  to  which  even  a  small  imagina- 
tion may  give  a  human  or  more  than  human  form. 
It  would  almost  seem  that  the  same  great  hand 
which  chiseled  out  these  monumental  forms  had 
also  laid  its  fingers  upon  the  people  of  this  region 
and  fashioned  them  rude  and  ironlike,  in  harmony 
with  the  stern  faces  set  about  them. 

Of  all  the  babes  of  that  primeval  mother,  the 
West,  the  cowboy  was  perhaps  her  dearest  because 
he  was  her  last.  Some  of  her  children  lived  for 
centuries;  this  one  for  not  a  triple  decade  before 
he  began  to  be  old.  What  was  really  the  life  of 
this  child  of  the  wild  region  of  America,  and  what 
were  the  conditions  of  the  experience  that  bore 

40 


THE  COWBOY  41 

him,  can  never  be  fully  known  by  those  who  have 
not  seen  the  West  with  wide  eyes  —  for  the  cow- 
boy was  simply  a  part  of  the  West.  He  who  does 
not  understand  the  one  can  never  understand  the 
other. 

If  we  care  truly  to  see  the  cowboy  as  he  was  and 
seek  to  give  our  wish  the  dignity  of  a  real  purpose, 
we  should  study  him  in  connection  with  his  sur- 
roundings and  in  relation  to  his  work.  Then  we 
shall  see  him  not  as  a  curiosity  but  as  a  product — 
not  as  an  eccentric  driver  of  horned  cattle  but  as 
a  man  suited  to  his  times. 

Large  tracts  of  that  domain  where  once  the  cow- 
boy reigned  supreme  have  been  turned  into  farms 
by  the  irrigator's  ditch  or  by  the  dry -farmer's  plan. 
The  farmer  in  overalls  is  in  many  instances  his 
own  stockman  today.  On  the  ranges  of  Arizona, 
Wyoming,  and  Texas  and  parts  of  Nevada  we 
may  find  the  cowboy,  it  is  true,  even  today:  but 
he  is  no  longer  the  Homeric  figure  that  once 
dominated  the  plains.  In  what  we  say  as  to  his 
trade,  therefore,  or  his  fashion  in  the  practice  of 
it,  we  speak  in  terms  of  thirty  or  forty  years  ago, 
when  wire  was  unknown,  when  the  round-up  still 
was  necessary,  and  the  cowboy's  life  was  indeed 
that  of  the  open. 


42       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

By  the  costume  we  may  often  know  the  man. 
The  cowboy's  costume  was  harmonious  with  its 
surroundings.  It  was  planned  upon  lines  of  such 
stern  utility  as  to  leave  no  possible  thing  which  we 
may  call  dispensable.  The  typical  cowboy  cos- 
tume could  hardly  be  said  to  contain  a  coat  and 
waistcoat.  The  heavy  woolen  shirt,  loose  and 
open  at  the  neck,  was  the  common  wear  at  all 
seasons  of  the  year  excepting  winter,  and  one  has 
often  seen  cowboys  in  the  winter-time  engaged  in 
work  about  the  yard  or  corral  of  the  ranch  wear- 
ing no  other  cover  for  the  upper  part  of  the  body 
but  one  or  more  of  these  heavy  shirts.  If  the 
cowboy  wore  a  coat  he  would  wear  it  open  and 
loose  as  much  as  possible.  If  he  wore  a  "vest" 
he  would  wear  it  slouchily,  hanging  open  or 
partly  unbuttoned  most  of  the  time.  There  was 
a  reason  for  this  slouchy  habit.  The  cowboy 
would  say  that  the  vest  closely  buttoned  about 
the  body  would  cause  perspiration,  so  that  the 
wearer  would  quickly  chill  upon  ceasing  exercise. 
If  the  wind  were  blowing  keenly  when  the  cow- 
boy dismounted  to  sit  upon  the  ground  for  din- 
ner, he  would  button  up  his  waistcoat  and  be 
warm.  If  it  were  very  cold  he  would  button  up 
his  coat  also. 


THE  COWBOY  43 

The  cowboy's  boots  were  of  fine  leather  and 
fitted  tightly,  with  light  narrow  soles,  extremely 
small  and  high  heels.  Surely  a  more  irrational 
foot-covering  never  was  invented;  yet  these  tight, 
peaked  cowboy  boots  had  a  great  significance  and 
may  indeed  be  called  the  insignia  of  a  calling. 
There  was  no  prouder  soul  on  earth  than  the  cow- 
boy. He  was  proud  of  being  a  horseman  and  had 
a  contempt  for  all  human  beings  who  walked. 
On  foot  in  his  tight-toed  boots  he  was  lost;  but  he 
wished  it  to  be  understood  that  he  never  was  on 
foot.  If  we  rode  beside  him  and  watched  his  seat 
in  the  big  cow  saddle  we  found  that  his  high  and 
narrow  heels  prevented  the  slipping  forward  of  the 
foot  in  the  stirrup,  into  which  he  jammed  his  feet 
nearly  full  length.  If  there  was  a  fall,  the  cow- 
boy's foot  never  hung  in  the  stirrup.  In  the  corral 
roping,  afoot,  his  heels  anchored  him.  So  he 
found  his  little  boots  not  so  unserviceable  and 
retained  them  as  a  matter  of  pride.  Boots  made 
for  the  cowboy  trade  sometimes  had  fancy  tops  of 
bright-colored  leather.  The  Lone  Star  of  Texas 
was  not  infrequent  in  their  ornamentation. 

The  curious  pride  of  the  horseman  extended  also 
to  his  gloves.  The  cowboy  was  very  careful  in  the 
selection  of  his  gloves.  They  were  made  of  the 


44       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

finest  buckskin,  which  could  not  be  injured  by 
wetting.  Generally  they  were  tanned  white  and 
cut  with  a  deep  cuff  or  gauntlet  from  which  hung 
a  little  fringe  to  flutter  in  the  wind  when  he  rode 
at  full  speed  on  horseback. 

The  cowboy's  hat  was  one  of  the  typical  and 
striking  features  of  his  costumes.  It  was  a  heavy, 
wide,  white  felt  hat  with  a  heavy  leather  band 
buckled  about  it.  There  has  been  no  other  head 
covering  devised  so  suitable  as  the  Stetson  for  the 
uses  of  the  Plains,  although  high  and  heavy  black 
hats  have  in  part  supplanted  it  today  among 
stockmen.  The  boardlike  felt  was  practically 
indestructible.  The  brim  flapped  a  little  and,  in 
time,  was  turned  up  and  perhaps  held  fast  to  the 
crown  by  a  thong.  The  wearer  might  sometimes 
stiffen  the  brim  by  passing  a  thong  through  a 
series  of  holes  pierced  through  the  outer  edge.  He 
could  depend  upon  his  hat  in  all  weathers.  In 
the  rain  it  was  an  umbrella;  in  the  sun  a  shield; 
in  the  winter  he  could  tie  it  down  about  his  ears 
with  his  handkerchief. 

Loosely  thrown  about  the  cowboy's  shirt  collar 
was  a  silk  kerchief.  It  was  tied  in  a  hard  knot 
in  front,  and  though  it  could  scarcely  be  said  to 
be  devoted  to  the  uses  of  a  neck  scarf,  yet  it  was 


THE  COWBOY  45 

a  great  comfort  to  the  back  of  the  neck  when 
one  was  riding  in  a  hot  wind.  It  was  sure  to  be 
of  some  bright  color,  usually  red.  Modern  would- 
be  cow-punchers  do  not  willingly  let  this  old  ker- 
chief die,  and  right  often  they  over-play  it.  For 
the  cowboy  of  the  "movies,"  however,  let  us  re- 
gister an  unqualified  contempt.  The  real  range 
would  never  have  been  safe  for  him. 

A  peculiar  and  distinctive  feature  of  the  cow- 
boy's costume  was  his  "chaps"  (chaparejos). 
The  chaps  were  two  very  wide  and  full-length 
trouser-legs  made  of  heavy  calfskin  and  connected 
by  a  narrow  belt  or  strap.  They  were  cut  away 
entirely  at  front  and  back  so  that  they  covered 
only  the  thigh  and  lower  legs  and  did  not  heat 
the  body  as  a  complete  leather  garment  would. 
They  were  intended  solely  as  a  protection  against 
branches,  thorns,  briers,  and  the  like,  but  they 
were  prized  in  cold  or  wet  weather.  Sometimes 
there  was  seen,  more  often  on  the  southern  range, 
a  cowboy  wearing  chaps  made  of  skins  tanned 
with  the  hah-  on;  for  the  cowboy  of  the  Southwest 
early  learned  that  goatskin  left  with  the  hair 
on  would  turn  the  cactus  thorns  better  than  any 
other  material.  Later,  the  chaps  became  a  sort 
of  affectation  on  the  part  of  new  men  on  the 


46       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

range;  but  the  old-time  cowboy  wore  them  for 
use,  not  as  a  uniform.  In  hot  weather  he  laid 
them  off. 

In  the  times  when  some  men  needed  guns  and  all 
men  carried  them,  no  pistol  of  less  than  44-caliber 
was  tolerated  on  the  range,  the  solid  framed  45- 
caliber  being  the  one  almost  universally  used. 
The  barrel  was  eight  inches  long,  and  it  shot  a 
rifle  cartridge  of  forty  grains  of  powder  and  a 
blunt-ended  bullet  that  made  a  terrible  missile. 
This  weapon  depended  from  a  belt  worn  loose  rest- 
ing upon  the  left  hip  and  hanging  low  down  on  the 
right  hip  so  that  none  of  the  weight  came  upon  the 
abdomen.  This  was  typical,  for  the  cowboy  was 
neither  fancy  gunman  nor  army  officer.  The  lat- 
ter carries  the  revolver  on  the  left,  the  butt  point- 
ing forward. 

An  essential  part  of  the  cow-puncher's  outfit  was 
his  "rope. "  This  was  carried  in  a  close  coil  at  the 
side  of  the  saddle-horn,  fastened  by  one  of  the  many 
thongs  scattered  over  the  saddle.  In  the  Spanish 
country  it  was  called  reata  and  even  today  is  some- 
times seen  in  the  Southwest  made  of  rawhide. 
In  the  South  it  was  called  a  lariat.  The  modern 
rope  is  a  well-made  three-quarter-inch  hemp  rope 
about  thirty  feet  in  length,  with  a  leather  or  raw- 


THE  COWBOY  47 

hide  eye.  The  cowboy's  quirt  was  a  short  heavy 
whip,  the  stock  being  of  wood  or  iron  covered  with 
braided  leather  and  carrying  a  lash  made  of  two 
or  three  heavy  loose  thongs.  The  spur  in  the  old 
days  had  a  very  large  rowel  with  blunt  teeth  an 
inch  long.  It  was  often  ornamented  with  little 
bells  or  oblongs  of  metal,  the  tinkling  of  which 
appealed  to  the  childlike  nature  of  the  Plains 
rider.  Their  use  was  to  lock  the  rowel. 

His  bridle  —  for,  since  the  cowboy  and  his 
mount  are  inseparable,  we  may  as  well  speak  of 
his  horse's  dress  also  —  was  noticeable  for  its  tre- 
mendously heavy  and  cruel  curbed  bit,  known  as 
the  "Spanish  bit."  But  in  the  ordinary  riding 
and  even  in  the  exciting  work  of  the  old  round-up 
and  in  "  cutting  out,"  the  cowboy  used  the  bit 
very  little,  nor  exerted  any  pressure  on  the  reins. 
He  laid  the  reins  against  the  neck  of  the  pony  op- 
posite to  the  direction  in  which  he  wished  it  to 
go,  merely  turning  his  hand  in  the  direction  and 
inclining  his  body  in  the  same  way.  He  rode 
with  the  pressure  of  the  knee  and  the  inclination 
of  the  body  and  the  light  side-shifting  of  both 
reins.  The  saddle  was  the  most  important  part 
of  the  outfit.  It  was  a  curious  thing,  this  saddle 
developed  by  the  cattle  trade,  and  the  world  has 


48       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

no  other  like  it.  Its  great  weight  —  from  thirty 
to  forty  pounds  —  was  readily  excusable  when  one 
remembers  that  it  was  not  only  seat  but  work- 
bench for  the  cowman.  A  light  saddle  would  be 
torn  to  pieces  at  the  first  rush  of  a  maddened 
steer,  but  the  sturdy  frame  of  a  cow-saddle  would 
throw  the  heaviest  bull  on  the  range.  The  high 
cantle  would  give  a  firmness  to  the  cowboy's  seat 
when  he  snubbed  a  steer  with  a  sternness  suffi- 
cient to  send  it  rolling  heels  over  head.  The 
high  pommel,  or  "horn,"  steel-forged  and  covered 
with  cross  braids  of  leather,  served  as  anchor 
post  for  this  same  steer,  a  turn  of  the  rope 
about  it  accomplishing  that  purpose  at  once. 
The  saddle-tree  forked  low  down  over  the  pony's 
back  so  that  the  saddle  sat  firmly  and  could  not 
readily  be  pulled  off.  The  great  broad  cinches 
bound  the  saddle  fast  till  horse  and  saddle  were 
practically  one  fabric.  The  strong  wooden  house 
of  the  old  heavy  stirrup  protected  the  foot  from 
being  crushed  by  the  impact  of  the  herd.  The 
form  of  the  cow-saddle  has  changed  but  little,  al- 
though today  one  sees  a  shorter  seat  and  smaller 
horn,  a  "swell  front"  or  roll,  and  a  stirrup  of  open 
"ox-bow"  pattern. 

The  round-up  was  the  harvest  of  the  range. 


THE  COWBOY  49 

The  time  of  the  calf  round-up  was  in  the  spring 
after  the  grass  had  become  good  and  after  the 
calves  had  grown  large  enough  for  the  branding. 
The  State  Cattle  Association  divided  the  entire 
State  range  into  a  number  of  round-up  districts. 
Under  an  elected  round-up  captain  were  all  the 
bosses  in  charge  of  the  different  ranch  outfits  sent 
by  men  having  cattle  in  the  round-up.  Let  us 
briefly  draw  a  picture  of  this  scene  as  it  was. 

Each  cowboy  would  have  eight  or  ten  horses  for 
his  own  use,  for  he  had  now  before  him  the  hard- 
est riding  of  the  year.  When  the  cow-puncher 
went  into  the  herd  to  cut  out  calves  he  mounted  a 
fresh  horse,  and  every  few  hours  he  again  changed 
horses,  for  there  was  no  horse  which  could  long 
endure  the  fatigue  of  the  rapid  and  intense  work 
of  cutting.  Before  the  rider  stretched  a  sea  of  in- 
terwoven horns,  waving  and  whirling  as  the  densely 
packed  ranks  of  cattle  closed  in  or  swayed  apart. 
It  was  no  prospect  for  a  weakling,  but  into  it  went 
the  cow-puncher  on  his  determined  little  horse, 
heeding  not  the  plunging,  crushing,  and  thrusting 
of  the  excited  cattle.  Down  under  the  bulks  of  the 
herd,  half  hid  in  the  whirl  of  dust,  he  would  spy  a 
little  curly  calf  running,  dodging,  and  twisting,  al- 
ways at  the  heels  of  its  mother;  and  he  would  dart 


50       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

in  after,  following  the  two  through  the  thick  of 
surging  and  plunging  beasts.  The  sharp-eyed 
pony  would  see  almost  as  soon  as  his  rider  which 
cow  was  wanted  and  he  needed  small  guidance 
from  that  time  on.  He  would  follow  hard  at  her 
heels,  edging  her  constantly  toward  the  flank  of 
the  herd,  at  times  nipping  her  hide  as  a  re- 
minder of  his  own  superiority.  In  spite  of  her- 
self the  cow  would  gradually  turn  out  toward  the 
edge,  and  at  last  would  be  swept  clear  of  the 
crush,  the  calf  following  close  behind  her.  There 
was  a  whirl  of  the  rope  and  the  calf  was  laid 
by  the  heels  and  dragged  to  the  fire  where  the 
branding  irons  were  heated  and  ready. 

Meanwhile  other  cow-punchers  are  rushing 
calves  to  the  branding.  The  hubbub  and  tur- 
moil increase.  Taut  ropes  cross  the  ground  in 
many  directions.  The  cutting  ponies  pant  and 
sweat,  rear  and  plunge.  The  garb  of  the  cow- 
boy is  now  one  of  white  alkali  which  hangs  gray 
in  his  eyebrows  and  moustache.  Steers  bellow 
as  they  surge  to  and  fro.  Cows  charge  on  their 
persecutors.  Fleet  yearlings  break  and  run  for 
the  open,  pursued  by  men  who  care  not  how  or 
where  they  ride. 

We  have  spoken  in  terms  of  the  past.    There  is 


THE  COWBOY  51 

no  calf  round-up  of  the  open  range  today.  The 
last  of  the  round-ups  was  held  in  Routt  County, 
Colorado,  several  years  ago,*  so  far  as  the  writer 
knows,  and  it  had  only  to  do  with  shifting  cattle 
from  the  summer  to  the  winter  range. 

After  the  calf  round-up  came  the  beef  round-up, 
the  cowman's  final  harvest.  This  began  in  July 
or  August.  Only  the  mature  or  fatted  animals 
were  cut  out  from  the  herd.  This  "beef  cut" 
was  held  apart  and  driven  on  ahead  from  place 
to  place  as  the  round-up  progressed.  It  was  then 
driven  in  by  easy  stages  to  the  shipping  point  on 
the  railroad,  whence  the  long  trainloads  of  cattle 
went  to  the  great  markets. 

In  the  heyday  of  the  cowboy  it  was  natural  that 
his  chief  amusements  should  be  those  of  the  out- 
door air  and  those  more  or  less  in  line  with  his 
employment.  He  was  accustomed  to  the  sight  of 
big  game,  and  so  had  the  edge  of  his  appetite  for 
its  pursuit  worn  off.  Yet  he  was  a  hunter,  just  as 
every  Western  man  was  a  hunter  in  the  times  of 
the  Western  game.  His  weapons  were  the  rifle, 
revolver,  and  rope;  the  latter  two  were  always  with 
him.  With  the  rope  at  times  he  captured  the 
coyote,  and  under  special  conditions  he  has  taken 
deer  and  even  antelope  in  this  way,  though  this 


62       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

was  of  course  most  unusual  and  only  possible  un« 
der  chance  conditions  of  ground  and  cover.  Elk 
have  been  roped  by  cowboys  many  times,  and 
it  is  known  that  even  the  mountain  sheep  has  been 
so  taken,  almost  incredible  as  that  may  seem. 
The  young  buffalo  were  easy  prey  for  the  cowboy 
and  these  he  often  roped  and  made  captive.  In 
fact  the  beginnings  of  all  the  herds  of  buffalo  now 
in  captivity  in  this  country  were  the  calves  roped 
and  secured  by  cowboys;  and  these  few  scattered 
individuals  of  a  grand  race  of  animals  remain  as 
melancholy  reminders  alike  of  a  national  shiftless- 
ness  and  an  individual  skill  and  daring. 

The  grizzly  was  at  times  seen  by  the  cowboys 
on  the  range,  and  if  it  chanced  that  several  cow- 
boys were  together  it  was  not  unusual  to  give  him 
chase.  They  did  not  always  rope  him,  for  it  was 
rarely  that  the  nature  of  the  country  made  this 
possible.  Sometimes  they  roped  him  and  wished 
they  could  let  him  go,  for  a  grizzly  bear  is  uncom- 
monly active  and  straightforward  in  his  habits 
at  close  quarters.  The  extreme  difficulty  of  such 
a  combat,  however,  gave  it  its  chief  fascination  for 
the  cowboy.  Of  course,  no  one  horse  could  hold 
the  bear  after  it  was  roped,  but,  as  one  after  an- 
other came  up,  the  bear  was  caught  by  neck  and 


THE  COWBOY  53 

foot  and  body,  until  at  last  he  was  tangled  and 
tripped  and  haled  about  till  he  was  helpless, 
strangled,  and  nearly  dead.  It  is  said  that  cow- 
boys have  so  brought  into  camp  a  grizzly  bear, 
forcing  him  to  half  walk  and  half  slide  at  the  end 
of  the  ropes.  No  feat  better  than  this  could  show 
the  courage  of  the  plainsman  and  of  the  horse 
which  he  so  perfectly  controlled. 

Of  such  wild  and  dangerous  exploits  were  the 
cowboy's  amusements  on  the  range.  It  may  be 
imagined  what  were  his  amusements  when  he 
visited  the  "settlements."  The  cow-punchers, 
reared  in  the  free  life  of  the  open  air,  under  cir- 
cumstances of  the  utmost  freedom  of  individual 
action,  perhaps  came  off  the  drive  or  round-up 
after  weeks  or  months  of  unusual  restraint  or 
hardship,  and  felt  that  the  time  had  arrived  for 
them  to  "celebrate."  Merely  great  rude  child- 
ren, as  wild  and  untamed  and  untaught  as  the 
herds  they  led,  they  regarded  their  first  look  at 
the  "settlements"  of  the  railroads  as  a  glimpse 
of  a  wider  world.  They  pursued  to  the  uttermost 
such  avenues  of  new  experience  as  lay  before  them, 
almost  without  exception  avenues  of  vice.  It  is 
strange  that  the  records  of  those  days  should  be 
chosen  by  the  public  to  be  held  as  the  measure 


54       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

of  the  American  cowboy.  Those  days  were  brief, 
and  they  are  long  since  gone.  The  American 
cowboy  atoned  for  them  by  a  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tury of  faithful  labor. 

The  amusements  of  the  cowboy  were  like  the 
features  of  his  daily  surroundings  and  occupa- 
tion—  they  were  intense,  large,  Homeric.  Yet, 
judged  at  his  work,  no  higher  type  of  employee 
ever  existed,  nor  one  more  dependable.  He  was 
the  soul  of  honor  in  all  the  ways  of  his  calling. 
The  very  blue  of  the  sky,  bending  evenly  over 
all  men  alike,  seemed  to  symbolize  his  instinct 
for  justice.  Faithfulness  and  manliness  were  his 
chief  traits;  his  standard  —  to  be  a  "square 


man." 


Not  all  the  open  range  will  ever  be  farmed,  but 
very  much  that  was  long  thought  to  be  irreclaim- 
able has  gone  under  irrigation  or  is  being  more 
or  less  successfully  "dry-farmed."  The  man  who 
brought  water  upon  the  arid  lands  of  the  West 
changed  the  entire  complexion  of  a  vast  country 
and  with  it  the  industries  of  that  country.  Acres 
redeemed  from  the  desert  and  added  to  the  realm 
of  the  American  farmer  were  taken  from  the  realm 
of  the  American  cowboy. 

The    West    has    changed.     The    curtain    has 


THE  COWBOY  55 

dropped  between  us  and  its  wild  and  stirring 
scenes.  The  old  days  are  gone.  The  house  dog 
sits  on  the  hill  where  yesterday  the  coyote  sang. 
There  are  fenced  fields  and  in  them  stand  sleek 
round  beasts,  deep  in  crops  such  as  their  ances- 
tors never  saw.  In  a  little  town  nearby  is  the 
hurry  and  bustle  of  modern  life.  This  town  is 
far  out  upon  what  was  called  the  frontier,  long 
after  the  frontier  has  really  gone.  Guarding  its 
ghost  here  stood  a  little  army  post,  once  one  of 
the  pillars,  now  one  of  the  monuments  of  the 
West. 

Out  from  the  tiny  settlement  in  the  dusk  of 
evening,  always  facing  toward  where  the  sun  is 
sinking,  might  be  seen  riding,  not  so  long  ago, 
a  figure  we  should  know.  He  would  thread  the 
little  lane  among  the  fences,  following  the  guid- 
ance of  hands  other  than  his  own,  a  thing  he 
would  once  have  scorned  to  do.  He  would  ride 
as  lightly  and  as  easily  as  ever,  sitting  erect  and 
jaunty  in  the  saddle,  his  reins  held  high  and  loose 
in  the  hand  whose  fingers  turn  up  gracefully,  his 
whole  body  free  yet  firm  in  the  saddle  with  the 
seat  of  the  perfect  horseman.  At  the  boom  of 
the  cannon,  when  the  flag  dropped  fluttering 
down  to  sleep,  he  would  rise  in  his  stirrups  and 


56       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

wave  his  hat  to  the  flag.  Then,  toward  the 
edge,  out  into  the  evening,  he  would  ride  on. 
The  dust  of  his  riding  would  mingle  with  the 
dusk  of  night.  We  could  not  see  which  was  the 
one  or  the  other.  We  could  only  hear  the  hoof- 
beats  passing,  boldly  and  steadily  still,  but  grow- 
ing fainter,  fainter,  and  more  faint.1 

TFor  permission  to  use  in  this  chapter  material  from  the 
author's  The  Story  of  the  Cowboy,  acknowledgment  is  made  to 
D.  Appleton  &  Co. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  MINES 

IF  the  influence  of  the  cattle  industry  was  para- 
mount in  the  development  of  the  frontier  region 
found  by  the  first  railways,  it  should  not  be  con- 
cluded that  this  upthrust  of  the  southern  cattle 
constituted  the  only  contribution  to  the  West  of 
that  day.  There  were  indeed  earlier  influences, 
the  chief  of  which  was  the  advent  of  the  wild  pop- 
ulation of  the  placer  mines.  The  riches  of  the 
gold-fields  hastened  the  building  of  the  first  trans- 
continental railroads  and  the  men  of  the  mines 
set  their  mark  also  indelibly  upon  the  range. 

It  is  no  part  of  our  business  here  to  follow  the 
great  discoveries  of  1849  in  California.1  Neither 
shall  we  chronicle  the  once-famous  rushes  from 
California  north  into  the  Fraser  River  Valley  of 
British  Columbia;  neither  is  it  necessary  to  men- 
tion in  much  detail  the  great  camps  of  Nevada; 

1  See  Stewart  Edward  White :  The  Fvrty-Niners  (Chronicles  cj 
America) . 

57 


58       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

nor  yet  the  short-lived  stampede  of  1859  to  the 
Pike's  Peak  country  in  Colorado.  The  rich  placer 
fields  of  Idaho  and  Montana,  from  which  enor- 
mous amounts  were  taken,  offer  typical  examples 
of  the  mining  communities  of  the  Rockies. 

We  may  never  know  how  much  history  remains 
forever  unwritten.  Of  the  beginnings  of  the 
Idaho  camps  there  have  trickled  back  into  record 
only  brief,  inconsequent,  and  partial  stories.  The 
miners  who  surged  this  way  and  that  all  through 
the  Sierras,  the  upper  Cascades,  north  into  the 
Selkirks,  and  thence  back  again  into  the  Rockies 
were  a  turbulent  mob.  Having  overrun  all  our 
mountain  ranges,  following  the  earlier  trails  of 
the  traders  and  trappers,  they  now  recoiled  upon 
themselves  and  rolled  back  eastward  to  meet  the 
advancing  civilization  of  the  westbound  rails,  car- 
ing nothing  for  history  and  less  for  the  civilized 
society  in  which  they  formerly  had  lived.  This 
story  of  bedlam  broken  loose,  of  men  gone  crazed 
by  the  sudden  subversion  of  all  known  values  and 
all  standards  of  life,  was  at  first  something  which 
had  no  historian  and  can  be  recorded  only  by 
way  of  hearsay  stories  which  do  not  always  tally 
as  to  the  truth. 

The   mad   treasure-hunters   of   the    California 


THE  MINES  59 

mines,  restless,  insubordinate,  incapable  of  re- 
straint, possessed  of  the  belief  that  there  might 
be  gold  elsewhere  than  in  California,  and  having 
heard  reports  of  strikes  to  the  north,  went  hurry- 
ing out  into  the  mountains  of  Oregon  and  Wash- 
ington, in  a  wild  stampede,  all  eager  again  to 
engage  in  the  glorious  gamble  where  by  one 
lucky  stroke  of  the  pick  a  man  might  be  set 
free  of  the  old  limitations  of  human  existence. 

So  the  flood  of  gold-seekers  —  passing  north  into 
the  Fraser  River  country,  south  again  into  Oregon 
and  Washington,  and  across  the  great  desert  plains 
into  Nevada  and  Idaho  —  made  new  centers  of 
lurid  activity,  such  as  Oro  Fino,  Florence,  and 
Carson.  Then  it  was  that  Walla  Walla  and  Lewis- 
ton,  outfitting  points  on  the  western  side  of  the 
range,  found  place  upon  the  maps  of  the  land, 
such  as  they  were. 

Before  these  adventurers,  now  eastbound  and 
no  longer  facing  west,  there  arose  the  vast  and 
formidable  mountain  ranges  which  in  their  time 
had  daunted  even  the  calm  minds  of  Meriwether 
Lewis  and  William  Clark.  But  the  prospectors 
and  the  pack-trains  alike  penetrated  the  Salmon 
River  Range.  Oro  Fino,  in  Idaho,  was  old  in 
1861.  The  next  great  strikes  were  to  be  made 


60       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

around  Florence.  Here  the  indomitable  packer 
from  the  West,  conquering  unheard-of  difficulties, 
brought  in  whiskey,  women,  pianos,  food,  mining- 
tools.  Naturally  all  these  commanded  fabulous 
prices.  The  price  for  each  and  all  lay  underfoot. 
Man,  grown  superman,  could  overleap  time  itself 
by  a  stroke  of  the  pick!  What  wonder  delirium 
reigned! 

These  events  became  known  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley  and  farther  eastward.  And  now  there 
came  hurrying  out  from  the  older  regions  many 
more  hundreds  and  thousands  eager  to  reach  a 
land  not  so  far  as  California,  but  reputed  to  be 
quite  as  rich.  It  was  then,  as  the  bull-trains 
came  in  from  the  East,  from  the  head  of  naviga- 
tion on  the  Missouri  River,  that  the  western  out- 
fitting points  of  Walla  Walla  and  Lewiston  lost 
their  importance. 

Southward  of  the  Idaho  camps  the  same  sort 
of  story  was  repeating  itself.  Nevada  had  drawn 
to  herself  a  portion  of  the  wild  men  of  the  stam- 
pedes. Carson  for  its  day  (1859-60)  was  a  capital 
not  unlike  the  others.  Some  of  its  men  had  come 
down  from  the  upper  fields,  some  had  arrived  from 
the  East  over  the  old  Santa  Fe  Trail,  and  yet  others 
had  drifted  in  from  California. 


THE  MINES  61 

All  the  camps  were  very  much  alike.  A  strag- 
gling row  of  log  cabins  or  huts  of  motley  con- 
struction; a  few  stores  so-called,  sometimes  of 
logs,  or,  if  a  saw-mill  was  at  hand,  of  rude  sawn 
boards;  a  number  of  saloons,  each  of  which  cus- 
tomarily also  supported  a  dance-hall;  a  series  of 
cabins  or  huts  where  dwelt  individual  men,  each 
doing  his  own  cooking  and  washing;  and  out- 
side these  huts  the  up  torn  earth  —  such  were  the 
camps  which  dotted  the  trails  of  the  stampedes 
across  inhospitable  deserts  and  mountain  ranges. 
Church  and  school  were  unknown.  Law  there 
was  none,  for  of  organized  society  there  was  none. 
The  women  who  lived  there  were  unworthy  of  the 
name  of  woman.  The  men  strode  about  in  the 
loose  dress  of  the  camp,  sometimes  without  waist- 
coat, sometimes  coatless,  shod  with  heavy  boots, 
always  armed. 

If  we  look  for  causes  contributory  to  the  history 
of  the  mining-camp,  we  shall  find  one  which  or- 
dinarily is  overlooked  —  the  invention  of  Colt's 
revolving  pistol.  At  the  time  of  the  Civil  War, 
though  this  weapon  was  not  old,  yet  it  had  at- 
tained very  general  use  throughout  the  frontier. 
That  was  before  the  day  of  modern  ammunition. 
The  six-shooter  of  the  placer  days  was  of  the  old 


62       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

cap-and-ball  type,  heavy,  long-barreled,  and  usu- 
ally wooden-handled.  It  was  the  general  owner- 
ship of  these  deadly  weapons  which  caused  so 
much  bloodshed  in  the  camps.  The  revolver  in 
the  hands  of  a  tyro  is  not  especially  serviceable, 
but  it  attained  great  deadliness  in  the  hands  of  an 
expert  user.  Such  a  man,  naturally  of  quick  nerve 
reflexes,  skillful  and  accurate  in  the  use  of  the 
weapon  through  long  practice,  became  a  danger- 
ous, and  for  a  time  an  unconquerable,  antagonist. 
It  is  a  curious  fact  that  the  great  Montana  fields 
were  doubly  discovered,  in  part  by  men  coming 
east  from  California,  and  in  part  by  men  passing 
west  in  search  of  new  gold-fields.  The  first  dis- 
covery of  gold  in  Montana  was  made  on  Gold 
Creek  by  a  half-breed  trapper  named  Frangois, 
better  known  as  Be-net-see.  This  was  in  1852, 
but  the  news  seems  to  have  lain  dormant  for  a 
time  —  naturally  enough,  for  there  was  small 
ingress  or  egress  for  that  wild  and  unknown 
country.  In  1857,  however,  a  party  of  miners 
who  had  wandered  down  the  Big  Hole  River  on 
their  way  back  east  from  California  decided  to 
look  into  the  Gold  Creek  discovery,  of  which 
they  had  heard.  This  party  was  led  by  James 
and  Granville  Stuart,  and  among  others  in  the 


THE  MINES  63 

party  were  Jake  Meeks,  Robert  Hereford,  Robert 
Dempsey,  John  W.  Powell,  John  M.  Jacobs, 
Thomas  Adams,  and  some  others.  These  men 
did  some  work  on  Gold  Creek  in  1858,  but  seem 
not  to  have  struck  it  very  rich,  and  to  have 
withdrawn  to  Fort  Bridger  in  Utah  until  the 
autumn  of  1860.  Then  a  prospector  by  the  name 
of  Tom  Golddigger  turned  up  at  Bridger  with 
additional  stories  of  creeks  to  the  north,  so  that 
there  was  a  gradual  straggling  back  toward  Gold 
Creek  and  other  gulches.  This  prospector  had 
been  all  over  the  Alder  Gulch,  which  was  ere 
long  to  prove  fabulously  rich. 

It  was  not,  however,  until  1863  that  the  Mon- 
tana camps  sprang  into  fame.  It  was  not  Gold 
Creek  or  Alder  Gulch,  but  Florence  and  other 
Idaho  camps,  that,  in  the  summer  and  autumn  of 
1862,  brought  into  the  mountains  no  less  than  five 
parties  of  gold-seekers,  who  remained  in  Montana 
because  they  could  not  penetrate  the  mountain 
barrier  which  lay  between  them  and  the  Salmon 
River  camps  in  Idaho. 

The  first  of  these  parties  arrived  at  Gold  Creek 
by  wagon-train  from  Fort  Benton  and  the  second 
hailed  from  Salt  Lake.  An  election  was  held  for 
the  purpose  of  forming  a  sort  of  community  or- 


64       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ganization,  the  first  election  ever  known  in  Mon- 
tana. The  men  from  the  East  had  brought  with 
them  some  idea  of  law  and  organization.  There 
were  now  in  the  Montana  fields  many  good  men 
such  as  the  Stuart  Brothers,  Samuel  T.  Hauser, 
Walter  Dance,  and  others  later  well  known  in  the 
State.  These  men  were  prominent  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  first  miners'  court,  which  had  occasion 
to  try  —  and  promptly  to  hang  —  Stillman  and 
Jernigan,  two  ruffians  who  had  been  in  from  the 
Salmon  River  mines  only  about  four  days  when 
they  thus  met  retribution  for  their  early  crimes. 
An  associate  of  theirs,  Arnett,  had  been  killed 
while  resisting  arrest.  The  reputation  of  Florence 
for  lawlessness  and  bloodshed  was  well  known; 
and,  as  the  outrages  of  the  well-organized  band  of 
desperadoes  operating  in  Idaho  might  be  expected 
to  begin  at  any  time  in  Montana,  a  certain  uneasi- 
ness existed  among  the  newcomers  from  the  States. 
Two  more  parties,  likewise  bound  for  Idaho 
and  likewise  baffled  by  the  Salmon  River  range, 
arrived  at  the  Montana  camps  in  the  same  sum- 
mer. Both  these  were  from  the  Pike's  Peak 
country  in  Colorado.  And  in  the  autumn  came 
a  fifth  —  this  one  under  military  protection,  Cap- 
tain James  L.  Fisk  commanding,  and  having  in  the 


THE  MINES  65 

party  a  number  of  settlers  bound  for  Oregon  as 
well  as  miners  for  Idaho.  This  expedition  ar- 
rived in  the  Prickly  Pear  Valley  in  Montana  on 
September  21,  1862,  having  left  St.  Paul  on 
the  16th  of  June,  traveling  by  steamboat  and 
wagon-train.  While  Captain  Fisk  and  his  ex- 
pedition pushed  on  to  Walla  Walla,  nearly  half 
of  the  immigrants  stayed  to  try  their  luck  at 
placer-mining.  But  the  yield  was  not  great  and 
the  distant  Salmon  River  mines,  their  original 
destination,  still  awaited  them.  Winter  was  ap- 
proaching. It  was  now  too  late  in  the  season 
to  reach  the  Salmon  River  mines,  five  hundred 
miles  across  the  mountains,  and  it  was  four  hun- 
dred miles  to  Salt  Lake,  the  nearest  supply  post; 
therefore,  most  of  the  men  joined  this  little  army 
of  prospectors  in  Montana.  Some  of  them  drifted 
to  the  Grasshopper  diggings,  soon  to  be  known 
under  the  name  of  Bannack  —  one  of  the  wildest 
mining-camps  of  its  day. 

These  different  origins  of  the  population  of  the 
first  Montana  camps  are  interesting  because  of 
the  fact  that  they  indicate  a  difference  in  the  two 
currents  of  population  which  now  met  here  in  the 
new  placer  fields.  In  general  the  wildest  and  most 
desperate  of  the  old-time  adventurers,  those  com- 


66       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ing  from  the  West,  had  located  in  the  Idaho  camps, 
and  might  be  expected  in  Montana  at  any  time. 
In  contrast  to  these,  the  men  lately  out  from  the 
States  were  of  a  different  type,  many  of  them 
sober,  most  of  them  law-abiding,  men  who  had 
come  out  to  better  their  fortunes  and  not  merely 
to  drop  into  the  wild  and  licentious  life  of  a  placer- 
camp.  Law  and  order  always  did  prevail  event- 
ually in  any  mining  community.  In  the  case  of 
Montana,  law  and  order  arrived  almost  synchro- 
nously with  lawlessness  and  desperadoism. 

Law  and  order  had  not  long  to  wait  before  the 
arrival  of  the  notorious  Henry  Plummer  and 
his  band  from  Florence.  Plummer  was  already 
known  as  a  bad  man,  but  was  not  yet  recognized 
as  the  leader  of  that  secret  association  of  robbers 
and  murderers  which  had  terrorized  the  Idaho 
camps.  He  celebrated  his  arrival  in  Bannack 
by  killing  a  man  named  Cleveland.  He  was  ac- 
quitted in  the  miners'  court  that  tried  him,  on 
the  usual  plea  of  self-defense.  He  was  a  man  of 
considerable  personal  address. 

The  same  tribunal  soon  assembled  once  more 
to  try  three  other  murderers,  Moore,  Reeves,  and 
Mitchell,  with  the  agreement  that  the  men  should 
have  a  jury  and  should  be  provided  with  counsel. 


THE  MINES  67 

They  were  all  practically  freed;  and  after  that 
the  roughs  grew  bolder  than  ever.  The  Plummer 
band  swore  to  kill  every  man  who  had  served  in 
that  court,  whether  as  juryman  or  officer.  So  well 
did  they  make  good  their  threat  that  out  of  the 
twenty-seven  men  thus  engaged  all  but  seven  were 
either  killed  or  driven  out  of  the  country,  nine  be- 
ing murdered  outright.  The  man  who  had  acted 
as  sheriff  of  this  miners'  court,  Hank  Crawford, 
was  unceasingly  hounded  by  Plummer,  who  sought 
time  and  again  to  fix  a  quarrel  on  him.  Plummer 
was  the  best  shot  in  the  mountains  at  that  time, 
and  he  thought  it  would  be  easy  for  him  to  kill  his 
man  and  enter  the  usual  plea  of  self-defense.  By 
good  fortune,  however,  Crawford  caught  Plummer 
off  his  guard  and  fired  upon  him  with  a  rifle, 
breaking  his  right  arm.  Plummer's  friends  called 
in  Dr.  Glick,  the  best  physician  in  Bannack,  to 
treat  the  wounded  man,  warning  him  that  if  he 
told  anything  about  the  visit  he  would  be  shot 
down.  Glick  held  his  peace,  and  later  was 
obliged  to  attend  many  of  the  wounded  out- 
laws, who  were  always  engaged  in  affairs  with 
firearms. 

Of  all  these  wild  affrays,  of  the  savage  life  which 
they  denoted,  and  of  the  stern  ways  in  which  ret- 


68       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ribution  overtook  the  desperadoes  of  the  mines, 
there  is  no  better  historian  than  Nathaniel  P. 
Langford,  a  prominent  citizen  of  the  West,  who 
accompanied  the  overland  expedition  of  1862  and 
took  part  in  the  earliest  life  of  Montana.  His 
work,  Vigilante  Days  and  Ways,  is  an  invaluable 
contemporary  record. 

It  is  mentally  difficult  for  us  now  fully  to  re- 
store these  scenes,  although  the  events  occurred 
no  earlier  than  the  Civil  War.  "Life  in  Ban- 
nack  at  this  time,"  says  Langford,  "was  perfect 
isolation  from  the  rest  of  the  world.  Napoleon 
was  not  more  of  an  exile  on  St.  Helena  than  a 
newly  arrived  immigrant  from  the  States  in  this 
region  of  lakes  and  mountains.  All  the  great 
battles  of  the  season  of  1862  —  Antietam,  Fred- 
ericksburg,  Second  Bull  Run  —  all  the  exciting 
debates  of  Congress,  and  the  more  exciting  com- 
bats at  sea,  first  became  known  to  us  on  the 
arrival  of  newspapers  and  letters  in  the  spring  of 
1863." 

The  Territory  of  Idaho,  which  included  Mon- 
tana and  nearly  all  Wyoming,  was  organized 
March  3,  1863.  Previous  to  that  time  western 
Montana  and  Idaho  formed  a  part  of  Washing- 
ton Territory,  of  which  Olympia  was  the  capital, 


THE  MINES  69 

and  Montana,  east  of  the  mountains,  belonged  to 
the  Territory  of  Dakota,  of  which  the  capital  was 
Yankton,  on  the  Missouri.  Langford  makes  clear 
the  political  uncertainties  of  the  time,  the  diffi- 
culty of  enforcing  the  laws,  and  narrates  the  cir- 
cumstances which  led  to  the  erection  in  1864  of 
the  new  Territory  of  Montana,  comprising  the 
limits  of  the  present  State.1 

In  Montana  as  elsewhere  in  these  days  of  great 
sectional  bitterness,  there  was  much  political 
strife;  and  this  no  doubt  accounts  for  an  aston- 
ishing political  event  that  now  took  place.  Henry 
Plummer,  the  most  active  outlaw  of  his  day,  was 
elected  sheriff  and  entrusted  with  the  enforce- 
ment of  the  laws!  He  made  indeed  a  great  show 
of  enforcing  the  laws.  He  married,  settled  down, 
and  for  a  time  was  thought  by  some  of  the  ill- 

1  The  Acts  of  Congress  organizing  Territories  and  admitting  States 
are  milestones  in  the  occupation  of  this  last  West.  On  the  eve  of 
the  Civil  War,  Kansas  was  admitted  into  the  Union;  during  the  war, 
the  Territories  of  Colorado,  Nevada,  Dakota,  Arizona,  Idaho,  and 
Montana  were  organized,  and  Nevada  was  admitted  as  a  State. 
Immediately  after  the  war,  Nebraska  was  admitted  and  Wyoming 
was  organized  as  a  Territory.  In  the  Centennial  Year  (1876)  Colo- 
rado became  a  State.  In  1889  and  1890  North  and  South  Dakota, 
Montana,  Washington,  Idaho,  and  Wyoming  were  admitted  as 
States.  In  the  latter  year  Oklahoma  was  carved  out  of  the  Indian 
Territory.  Utah  with  its  Mormon  population  was  kept  waiting  at 
the  doors  of  the  Union  until  1896.  Oklahoma  became  a  State  in 
1907;  Arizona  and  New  Mexico  were  admitted  in  1912. 


70       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

advised  to  have  reformed  his  ways,  although  in 
truth  he  could  not  have  reformed. 

By  June,  1863,  the  extraordinarily  rich  strike 
in  Alder  Gulch  had  been  made.  The  news  of  this 
spread  like  wildfire  to  Bannack  and  to  the  Salmon 
River  mines  in  Idaho  as  well,  and  the  result  was 
one  of  the  fiercest  of  all  the  stampedes,  and  the 
rise,  almost  overnight,  of  Virginia  City.  Mean- 
while some  Indian  fighting  had  taken  place  and  in 
a  pitched  battle  on  the  Bear  River  General  Con- 
nor had  beaten  decisively  the  Bannack  Indians, 
who  for  years  had  preyed  on  the  emigrant  trains. 
This  made  travel  on  the  mountain  trails  safer  than 
it  had  been;  and  the  rich  Last  Chance  Gulch  on 
which  the  city  of  Helena  now  stands  attracted  a 
tremendous  population  almost  at  once.  The  his- 
torian above  cited  lived  there.  Let  him  tell  of 
the  life. 

One  long  stream  of  active  life  filled  the  little  creek 
on  its  auriferous  course  from  Bald  Mountain,  through 
a  canyon  of  wild  and  picturesque  character,  until  it 
emerged  into  the  large  and  fertile  valley  of  the  Pas-sam- 
a-ri  .  .  .  the  mountain  stream  called  by  Lewis  and 
Clark  in  their  journal  "Philanthropy  River."  Lat- 
eral streams  of  great  beauty  pour  down  the  sides  of 
the  mountain  chain  bounding  the  valley.  .  .  .  Gold 
placers  were  found  upon  these  streams  and  occupied 


THE  MINES  71 

soon  after  the  settlement  at  Virginia  City  was  com- 
menced. .  .  .  This  human  hive,  numbering  at  least 
ten  thousand  people,  was  the  product  of  ninety  days. 
Into  it  were  crowded  all  the  elements  of  a  rough  and 
active  civilization.  Thousands  of  cabins  and  tents 
and  brush  wakiups  .  .  .  were  seen  on  every  hand. 
Every  foot  of  the  gulch  .  .  .  was  undergoing  dis- 
placement, and  it  was  already  disfigured  by  huge 
heaps  of  gravel  which  had  been  passed  through  the 
sluices  and  rifled  of  their  glittering  contents.  .  .  . 
Gold  was  abundant,  and  every  possible  device  was 
employed  by  the  gamblers,  the  traders,  the  vile  men 
and  women  that  had  come  in  with  the  miners  into 
the  locality,  to  obtain  it.  Nearly  every  third  cabin 
was  a  saloon  where  vile  whiskey  was  peddled  out  for 
fifty  cents  a  drink  in  gold  dust.  Many  of  these  places 
were  filled  with  gambling  tables  and  gamblers.  .  .  . 
Hurdy-gurdy  dance-houses  were  numerous.  .  .  .  Not 
a  day  or  night  passed  which  did  not  yield  its  full  frui- 
tion of  vice,  quarrels,  wounds,  or  murders.  The  crack 
of  the  revolver  was  often  heard  above  the  merry  notes 
of  the  violin.  Street  fights  were  frequent,  and  as  no 
one  knew  when  or  where  they  would  occur,  every  one 
was  on  his  guard  against  a  random  shot. 

Sunday  was  always  a  gala  day.  .  .  .  The  stores 
were  all  open.  .  .  .  Thousands  of  people  crowded  the 
thoroughfares  ready  to  rush  in  the  direction  of  any 
promised  excitement.  Horse-racing  was  among  the 
most  favored  amusements.  Prize  rings  were  formed, 
and  brawny  men  engaged  in  fisticuffs  until  their  sight 
was  lost  and  their  bodies  pommelled  to  a  jelly,  while 
hundreds  of  onlookers  cheered  the  victor.  .  .  .  Pistols 
flashed,  bowie  knives  flourished,  and  braggart  oaths 


72       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

filled  the  air,  as  often  as  men's  passions  triumphed  over 
their  reason.  This  was  indeed  the  reign  of  unbridled 
license,  and  men  who  at  first  regarded  it  with  disgust 
and  terror,  by  constant  exposure  soon  learned  to  become 
a  part  of  it  and  forget  that  they  had  ever  been  aught 
else.  All  classes  of  society  were  represented  at  this 
general  exhibition.  Judges,  lawyers,  doctors,  even 
clergymen,  could  not  claim  exemption.  Culture  and 
religion  afforded  feeble  protection,  where  allurement 
and  indulgence  ruled  the  hour. 

Imagine,  therefore,  a  fabulously  rich  mountain 
valley  twelve  miles  in  extent,  occupied  by  more 
than  ten  thousand  men  and  producing  more 
than  ten  millions  of  dollars  before  the  close  of 
the  first  year!  It  is  a  stupendous  demand  on 
any  imagination.  How  might  all  this  gold  be 
sent  out  in  safe-keeping?  We  are  told  that  the 
only  stage  route  extended  from  Virginia  City  no 
farther  than  Bannack.  Between  Virginia  City 
and  Salt  Lake  City  there  was  an  absolute  wilder- 
ness, wholly  unsettled,  four  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  miles  in  width.  "There  was  no  post  office 
in  the  Territory.  Letters  were  brought  from  Salt 
Lake  first  at  a  cost  of  two  dollars  and  a  half  each, 
and  later  in  the  season  at  one  dollar  each.  All 
money  at  infinite  risk  was  sent  to  the  nearest  ex- 
press office  at  Salt  Lake  City  by  private  hands. " 


THE  MINES  73 

Practically  every  man  in  the  new  gold-fields 
was  aware  of  the  existence  of  a  secret  band  of 
well-organized  ruffians  and  robbers.  The  general 
feeling  was  one  of  extreme  uneasiness.  There 
were  plenty  of  men  who  had  taken  out  of  the 
ground  considerable  quantities  of  gold,  and  who 
would  have  been  glad  to  get  back  to  the  East  with 
their  little  fortunes,  but  they  dared  not  start. 
Time  after  time  the  express  coach,  the  solitary 
rider,  the  unguarded  wagon-train,  were  held  up 
and  robbed,  usually  with  the  concomitant  of 
murder.  When  the  miners  did  start  out  from 
one  camp  to  another  they  took  all  manner  of 
precautions  to  conceal  their  gold  dust.  We  are 
told  that  on  one  occasion  one  party  bored  a  hole 
in  the  end  of  the  wagon  tongue  with  an  auger 
and  filled  it  full  of  gold  dust,  thus  escaping  ob- 
servation! The  robbers  learned  to  know  the  ex- 
press agents,  and  always  had  advice  of  every 
large  shipment  of  gold.  It  was  almost  useless  to 
undertake  to  conceal  anything  from  them;  and 
resistance  was  met  with  death.  Such  a  reign  of 
terror,  such  an  organized  system  of  highway  rob- 
bery, such  a  light  valuing  of  human  life,  has  been 
seldom  found  in  any  other  time  or  place. 

There  were,  as  we  have  seen,  good  men  in  these 


74       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

camps  —  although  the  best  of  them  probably  let 
down  the  standards  of  living  somewhat  after  their 
arrival  there;  but  the  trouble  was  that  the  good 
men  did  not  know  one  another,  had  no  organiza- 
tion, and  scarcely  dared  at  first  to  attempt  one. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  robbers'  organization  was 
complete  and  kept  its  secrets  as  the  grave; 
indeed,  many  and  many  a  lonesome  grave  held 
secrets  none  ever  was  to  know.  How  many  men 
went  out  from  Eastern  States  and  disappeared, 
their  fate  always  to  remain  a  mystery,  is  a  part 
of  the  untold  story  of  the  mining  frontier. 

There  are  known  to  have  been  a  hundred  and 
two  men  killed  by  Plummer  and  his  gang;  how 
many  were  murdered  without  their  fate  ever  being 
discovered  can  not  be  told.  Plummer  was  the 
leader  of  the  band,  but,  arch-hypocrite  that  he 
was,  he  managed  to  keep  his  own  connection  with 
it  a  secret.  His  position  as  sheriff  gave  him  many 
advantages.  He  posed  as  being  a  silver-mine 
expert,  among  other  things,  and  often  would  be 
called  out  to  "expert"  some  new  mine.  That 
usually  meant  that  he  left  town  in  order  to  com- 
mit some  desperate  robbery.  The  boldest  out- 
rages always  required  Plummer  as  the  leader. 
Sometimes  he  would  go  away  on  the  pretense  of 


THE  MINES  75 

following  some  fugitive  from  justice.  His  horse, 
the  fleetest  in  the  country,  often  was  found,  labor- 
ing and  sweating,  at  the  rear  of  his  house.  That 
meant  that  Plummer  had  been  away  on  some  se- 
cret errand  of  his  own.  He  was  suspected  many 
times,  but  nothing, could  be  fastened  upon  him; 
or  there  lacked  sufficient  boldness  and  sufficient 
organization  on  the  part  of  the  law-and-order 
men  to  undertake  his  punishment. 

We  are  not  concerned  with  repeating  thrilling 
tales,  bloody  almost  beyond  belief,  and  indicative 
of  an  incomprehensible  depravity  in  human  nat- 
ure, so  much  as  we  are  with  the  causes  and  effects 
of  this  wild  civilization  which  raged  here  quite 
alone  in  the  midst  of  one  of  the  wildest  of  the 
western  mountain  regions.  It  will  best  serve  our 
purpose  to  retain  in  mind  the  twofold  character 
of  this  population,  and  to  remember  that  the 
frontier  caught  to  itself  not  only  ruffians  and  des- 
peradoes, men  undaunted  by  any  risk,  but  also 
men  possessed  of  a  yet  steadier  personal  courage 
and  hardihood.  There  were  men  rough,  coarse, 
brutal,  murderous;  but  against  them  were  other 
men  self-reliant,  stern,  just,  and  resolved  upon 
fair  play. 

That  was  indeed  the  touchstone  of  the  entire 


76       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

civilization  which  followed  upon  the  heels  of  these 
scenes  of  violence.  It  was  fair  play  which  really 
animated  the  great  Montana  Vigilante  movement 
and  which  eventually  cleaned  up  the  merciless 
gang  of  Henry  Plummer  and  his  associates.  The 
centers  of  civilization  were  far  removed.  The 
courts  were  powerless.  In  some  cases  even  the 
machinery  of  the  law  was  in  the  hands  of  these 
ruffians.  But  so  violent  were  their  deeds,  so  bru- 
tal, so  murderous,  so  unfair,  that  slowly  the  in- 
dignation of  the  good  men  arose  to  the  white-hot 
point  of  open  resentment  and  of  swift  retribution. 
What  the  good  men  of  the  frontier  loved  most  of 
all  was  justice.  They  now  enforced  justice  in  the 
only  way  left  open  to  them.  They  did  this  as 
California  earlier  had  done;  and  they  did  it  so  well 
that  there  was  small  need  to  repeat  the  lesson. 

The  actual  extermination  of  the  Henry  Plum- 
mer band  occurred  rather  promptly  when  the 
Vigilantes  once  got  under  way.  One  of  the 
band  by  the  name  of  Red  Yager,  in  company 
with  yet  another  by  the  name  of  Brown,  had 
been  concerned  in  the  murder  of  Lloyd  Magru- 
der,  a  merchant  of  the  Territory.  The  capture 
of  these  two  followed  closely  upon  the  hanging 
of  George  Ives,  also  accused  of  more  than  one 


THE  MINES  77 

murder.  Ives  was  an  example  of  the  degrading 
influence  of  the  mines.  He  was  a  decent  young 
man  until  he  left  his  home* in  Wisconsin.  He 
was  in  California  from  1857  to  1858.  When  he 
appeared  in  Idaho  he  seemed  to  have  thrown  off 
all  restraint  and  to  have  become  a  common  rowdy 
and  desperado.  It  is  said  of  him  that  "few  men 
of  his  age  ever  had  been  guilty  of  so  many  fiend- 
ish crimes." 

Yager  and  Brown,  knowing  the  fate  which  Ives 
had  met,  gave  up  hope  when  they  fell  into  the 
hands  of  the  newly  organized  Vigilantes.  Brown 
was  hanged;  so  was  Yager;  but  Yager,  before  his 
death,  made  a  full  confession  which  put  the  Vigi- 
lantes in  possession  of  information  they  had  never 
yet  been  able  to  secure. x 

Much  has  been  written  and  much  romanced 

1  Langford  gives  these  names  disclosed  by  Yager  as  follows:  "Henry 
Plummer  was  chief  of  the  band;  Bill  Bunton,  stool  pigeon  and  second 
in  command;  George  Brown,  secretary;  Sam  Bunton,  roadster; 
Cyrus  Skinner,  fence,  spy,  and  roadster;  George  Shears,  horse  thief 
and  roadster;  Frank  Parish,  horst  thief  and  roadster;  Hayes  Lyons, 
telegraph  man  and  roadster;  Bill  Hunter,  telegraph  man  and  road- 
ster; Ned  Ray,  council-room  keeper  at  Bannack  City;  George  Ives, 
Stephen  Marshland,  Dutch  John  (Wagner),  Alex  Carter,  Whiskey 
Bill  (Graves),  Johnny  Cooper,  Buck  Stinson,  Mexican  Frank,  Bob 
Zachary,  Boone  Helm,  Clubfoot  George  (Lane),  Billy  Terwiliger, 
Gad  Moore,  were  roadsters."  Practically  all  these  were  executed 
by  the  Vigilantes,  with  many  others,  and  eventually  the  band  of 
outlaws  was  entirely  broken  up. 


78       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

about  the  conduct  of  these  desperadoes  when 
they  met  their  fate.  Some  of  them  were  brave 
and  some  proved  cowards  at  the  last.  For  a 
time,  Plummer  begged  abjectly,  his  eyes  stream- 
ing with  tears.  Suddenly  he  was  smitten  with 
remorse  as  the  whole  picture  of  his  past  life 
appeared  before  him.  He  promised  everything, 
begged  everything,  if  only  life  might  be  spared 
him  —  asked  his  captors  to  cut  off  his  ears,  to  cut 
out  his  tongue,  then  strip  him  naked  and  banish 
him.  At  the  very  last,  however,  he  seems  to 
have  become  composed.  Stinson  and  Ray  went 
to  their  fate  alternately  swearing  and  whining. 
Some  of  the  ruffians  faced  death  boldly.  More 
than  one  himself  jumped  from  the  ladder  or 
kicked  from  under  him  the  box  which  was  the 
only  foothold  between  him  and  eternity.  Boone 
Helm  was  as  hardened  as  any  of  them.  This 
man  was  a  cannibal  and  murderer.  He  seems 
to  have  had  no  better  nature  whatever.  His 
last  words  as  he  sprang  off  were  "Hurrah  for 
Jeff  Davis!  Let  her  rip!"  Another  man  re- 
marked calmly  that  he  cared  no  more  for  hang- 
ing than  for  drinking  a  glass  of  water.  But  each 
after  his  own  fashion  met  the  end  foreordained 
for  him  by  his  own  lack  of  compassion;  and  of 


THE  MINES  79 

compassion  he  received  none  at  the  hands  of  the 
men  who  had  resolved  that  the  law  should  be  es- 
tablished and  should  remain  forever. 

There  was  an  instant  improvement  in  the  social 
life  of  Virginia  City,  Bannack,  and  the  adjoining 
camps  as  soon  as  it  was  understood  that  the  Vigi- 
lantes were  afoot.  Langford,  who  undoubtedly 
knew  intimately  of  the  activities  of  this  organi- 
zation, makes  no  apology  for  the  acts  of  the  Vigi- 
lantes, although  they  did  not  have  back  of  them 
the  color  of  the  actual  law.  He  says: 

The  retribution  dispensed  to  these  daring  freebooters 
in  no  respect  exceeded  the  demands  of  absolute  justice. 
.  .  .  There  was  no  other  remedy.  Practically  the 
citizens  had  no  law,  but  if  law  had  existed  it  could 
not  have  afforded  adequate  redress.  This  was  proven 
by  the  feeling  of  security  consequent  upon  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  band.  When  the  robbers  were  dead  the 
people  felt  safe,  not  for  themselves  alone  but  for  their 
pursuits  and  their  property.  They  could  travel  with- 
out fear.  They  had  reasonable  assurance  of  safety  in 
the  transmission  of  money  to  the  States  and  in  the 
arrival  of  property  over  the  unguarded  route  from  Salt 
Lake.  The  crack  of  pistols  had  ceased,  and  they  could 
walk  the  streets  without  constant  exposure  to  danger. 
There  was  an  omnipresent  spirit  of  protection,  akin  to 
that  omnipresent  spirit  of  law  which  pervaded  older 
and  more  civilized  communities.  .  .  .  Young  men 
who  had  learned  to  believe  that  the  roughs  were  des- 


80       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

lined  to  rule  and  who,  under  the  influence  of  that  faith, 
were  fast  drifting  into  crime  shrunk  appalled  before  the 
thorough  work  of  the  Vigilantes.  Fear,  more  potent 
than  conscience,  forced  even  the  worst  of  men  to  ob- 
serve the  requirements  of  society,  and  a  feeling  of 
comparative  security  among  all  classes  was  the  result. 

Naturally  it  was  not  the  case  that  all  the  bad 
men  were  thus  exterminated.  From  time  to  time 
there  appeared  vividly  in  the  midst  of  these  sur- 
roundings additional  figures  of  solitary  despera- 
does, each  to  have  his  list  of  victims,  and  each 
himself  to  fall  before  the  weapons  of  his  enemies  or 
to  meet  the  justice  of  the  law  or  the  sterner  meed 
of  the  Vigilantes.  It  would  not  be  wholly  pleas- 
ant to  read  even  the  names  of  a  long  list  of  these; 
perhaps  it  will  be  sufficient  to  select  one,  the  no- 
torious Joseph  Slade,  one  of  the  "picturesque" 
characters  of  whom  a  great  deal  of  inaccurate  and 
puerile  history  has  been  written.  The  truth  about 
Slade  is  that  he  was  a  good  man  at  first,  faith- 
ful in  the  discharge  of  his  duties  as  an  agent  of 
the  stage  company.  Needing  at  times  to  use  vio- 
lence lawfully,  he  then  began  to  use  it  unlawfully. 
He  drank  and  soon  went  from  bad  to  worse.  At 
length  his  outrages  became  so  numerous  that  the 
men  of  the  community  took  him  out  and  hanged 


THE  MINES  81 

him.     His  fate  taught  many  others  the  risk  of 
going  too  far  in  defiance  of  law  and  decency. 

What  has  been  true  regarding  the  camps  of 
Florence,  Bannack,  and  Virginia  City,  had  been 
true  in  part  in  earlier  camps  and  was  to  be  re- 
peated perhaps  a  trifle  less  vividly  in  other  camps 
yet  to  come.  The  Black  Hills  gold  rush,  for  in- 
stance, which  came  after  the  railroad  but  before 
the  Indians  were  entirely  cleared  away,  made  a 
certain  wild  history  of  its  own.  We  had  our  Dead- 
wood  stage  line  then,  and  our  Dead  wood  City 
with  all  its  wild  life  of  drinking,  gambling,  and 
shooting  —  the  place  where  more  than  one  notor- 
ious bad  man  lost  his  life,  and  some  capable  of- 
ficers of  the  peace  shared  their  fate.  To  describe 
in  detail  the  life  of  this  stampede  and  the  wild 
scenes  ensuing  upon  it  is  perhaps  not  needful  here. 
The  main  thing  is  that  the  great  quartz  lodes 
of  the  Black  Hills  support  in  the  end  a  steady, 
thrifty,  and  law-abiding  population. 

All  over  that  West,  once  so  unspeakably  wild 
and  reckless,  there  now  rise  great  cities  where 
recently  were  scattered  only  mining-camps  scarce 
fit  to  be  called  units  of  any  social  compact.  It 
was  but  yesterday  that  these  men  fought  and 

6 


82       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

drank  and  dug  their  own  graves  in  their  own 
sluices.  At  the  city  of  Helena,  on  the  site  of  Last 
Chance  Gulch,  one  recalls  that  not  so  long  ago 
citizens  could  show  with  a  certain  contemporary 
pride  the  old  dead  tree  once  known  as  "Hang- 
man's Tree."  It  marked  a  spot  which  might 
be  called  a  focus  of  the  old  frontier.  Around  it, 
and  in  the  country  immediately  adjoining,  was 
fought  out  the  great  battle  whose  issue  could 
not  be  doubted  —  that  between  the  new  and  the 
old  days;  between  law  and  order  and  individual 
lawlessness;  between  the  school  and  the  saloon; 
between  the  home  and  the  dance-hall;  between 
society  united  and  resolved  and  the  individual 
reverted  to  worse  than  savagery. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST 

SINCE  we  have  declared  ourselves  to  be  less  in- 
terested in  bald  chronology  than  in  the  naturally 
connected  causes  of  events  which  make  chronology 
worth  while,  we  may  now,  perhaps,  double  back 
upon  the  path  of  chronology,  and  take  up  the 
great  early  highways  of  the  West  —  what  we  might 
call  the  points  of  attack  against  the  frontier. 

The  story  of  the  Santa  Fe  Trail,  now  passing 
into  oblivion,  once  was  on  the  tongue  of  every 
man.  This  old  highroad  in  its  heyday  presented 
the  most  romantic  and  appealing  features  of  the 
earlier  frontier  life.  The  Santa  Fe  Trail  was  the 
great  path  of  commerce  between  our  frontier  and 
the  Spanish  towns  trading  through  Santa  Fe. 
This  commerce  began  in  1822,  when  about  three- 
score men  shipped  certain  goods  across  the  lower 
Plains  by  pack-animals.  By  1826  it  was  employ- 
ing a  hundred  men  and  was  using  wagons  and 

83 


84       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

mules.  In  1830,  when  oxen  first  were  used  on  the 
trail,  the  trade  amounted  to  $120,000  annually; 
and  by  1843,  when  the  Spanish  ports  were  closed, 
it  had  reached  the  value  of  $450,000,  involving 
the  use  of  230  wagons  and  350  men.  It  was  this 
great  wagon  trail  which  first  brought  us  into  touch 
with  the  Spanish  civilization  of  the  Southwest.  Its 
commercial  totals  do  not  bulk  large  today,  but 
the  old  trail  itself  was  a  thing  titanic  in  its  his- 
toric value. 

This  was  the  day  not  of  water  but  of  land  trans- 
port; yet  the  wheeled  vehicles  which  passed  out 
into  the  West  as  common  carriers  of  civilization 
clung  to  the  river  valleys  —  natural  highways 
and  natural  resting  places  of  home-building  man. 
This  has  been  the  story  of  the  advance  of  civili- 
zation from  the  first  movements  of  the  world's 
peoples.  The  valleys  are  the  cleats  of  civiliza- 
tion's golden  sluices. 

There  lay  the  great  valley  of  the  Arkansas, 
offering  food  and  water,  an  easy  grade  and  a  direct 
course  reaching  out  into  the  West,  even  to  the 
edge  of  the  lands  of  Spain;  and  here  stood  wheeled 
vehicles  able  to  traverse  it  and  to  carry  dry- 
goods  and  hardware,  and  especially  domestic 
cotton  fabrics,  which  formed  the  great  staple  of 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST  85 
a  "Santa  Fe  assortment."  The  people  of  the 
Middle  West  were  now,  in  short,  able  to  feed  and 
clothe  themselves  and  to  offer  a  little  of  their 
surplus  merchandise  to  some  one  else  in  sale. 
They  had  begun  to  export!  Out  yonder,  in  a 
strange  and  unknown  land,  lay  one  of  the  origi- 
nal markets  of  America! 

On  the  heels  of  Lewis  and  Clark,  who  had  just 
explored  the  Missouri  River  route  to  the  North- 
west, Captain  Zebulon  Pike  of  the  Army,  long 
before  the  first  wheeled  traffic  started  West,  had 
employed  this  valley  of  the  Arkansas  in  his  search 
for  the  southwestern  delimitations  of  the  United 
States.  Pike  thought  he  had  found  the  head  of 
the  Red  River  when  after  a  toilsome  and  danger- 
ous march  he  reached  the  headwaters  of  the  Rio 
Grande.  But  it  was  not  our  river.  It  belonged 
to  Spain,  as  he  learned  to  his  sorrow,  when  he 
marched  all  the  way  to  Chihuahua  in  old  Mexico 
and  lay  there  during  certain  weary  months. 

It  was  Pike's  story  of  the  far  Southwest  that 
first  started  the  idea  of  the  commerce  of  the 
Santa  Fe  Trail.  In  that  day  geography  was  a 
human  thing,  a  thing  of  vital  importance  to  all 
men.  Men  did  not  read  the  stock  markets;  they 
read  stories  of  adventure,  tales  of  men  returned 


86       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

from  lands  out  yonder  in  the  West.  Heretofore 
the  swarthy  Mexicans,  folk  of  the  dry  plains  and 
hills  around  the  head  of  the  Rio  Grande  and  the 
Red,  had  carried  their  cotton  goods  and  many 
other  small  and  needful  things  all  the  way  from 
Vera  Cruz  on  the  seacoast,  over  trails  that  were 
long,  tedious,  uncertain,  and  expensive.  A  far 
shorter  and  more  natural  trade  route  went  west 
along  the  Arkansas,  which  would  bring  the  Amer- 
ican goods  to  the  doors  of  the  Spanish  settlements. 
After  Pike  and  one  or  two  others  had  returned 
with  reports  of  the  country,  the  possibilities  of 
this  trade  were  clear  to  any  one  with  the  mer- 
chant's imagination. 

There  is  rivalry  for  the  title  of  "Father  of  the 
Santa  Fe  Trail."  As  early  as  1812,  when  the 
United  States  was  at  war  with  England,  a  party 
of  men  on  horseback  trading  into  the  West,  com- 
monly called  the  McKnight,  Baird,  and  Cham- 
bers party,  made  their  way  west  to  Santa  Fe. 
There,  however,  they  met  with  disaster.  All  their 
goods  were  confiscated  and  they  themselves  lay  in 
Mexican  jails  for  nine  years.  Eventually  the  re- 
turning survivors  of  this  party  told  their  stories, 
and  those  stories,  far  from  chilling,  only  inflamed 
the  ardor  of  other  adventurous  traders.  In  1821 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST          87 

more  than  one  American  trader  reached  Santa 
Fe;  and,  now  that  the  Spanish  yoke  had  been 
thrown  off  by  the  Mexicans,  -the  goods,  instead 
of  being  confiscated,  were  purchased  eagerly. 

It  is  to  be  remembered,  of  course,  that  trading 
of  this  sort  to  Mexico  was  not  altogether  a  new 
thing.  Sutlers  of  the  old  fur  traders  and  trappers 
already  had  found  the  way  to  New  Spain  from 
the  valley  of  the  Platte,  south  along  the  eastern 
edge  of  the  Rockies,  through  Wyoming  and 
Colorado.  By  some  such  route  as  that  at  least 
one  trader,  a  French  Creole,  agent  of  the  firm 
of  Bryant  &  Morrison  at  Kaskaskia,  had  pene- 
trated to  the  Spanish  lands  as  early  as  1804,  while 
Lewis  and  Clark  were  still  absent  in  the  upper 
wilderness.  Each  year  the  great  mountain  ren- 
dezvous of  the  trappers  —  now  at  Bent's  Fort 
on  the  Arkansas,  now  at  Horse  Creek  in  Wyo- 
ming, now  on  Green  River  in  Utah,  or  even  far- 
ther beyond  the  mountains  —  demanded  supplies 
of  food  and  traps  and  ammunition  to  enable  the 
hunters  to  continue  their  work  for  another  year. 
Perhaps  many  of  the  pack-trains  which  regularly 
supplied  this  shifting  mountain  market  already 
had  traded  in  the  Spanish  country. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  go  into  further  details 


88       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

regarding  this  primitive  commerce  of  the  prairies. 
It  yielded  a  certain  profit;  it  shaped  the  character 
of  the  men  who  carried  it  on.  But  what  is  yet 
more  important,  it  greatly  influenced  the  country 
which  lay  back  of  the  border  on  the  Missouri 
River.  It  called  yet  more  men  from  the  eastern 
settlements  to  those  portions  which  lay  upon 
the  edge  of  the  Great  Plains.  There  crowded  yet 
more  thickly,  up  to  the  line  between  the  certain 
and  the  uncertain,  the  restless  westbound  popula- 
tion of  all  the  country. 

If  on  the  south  the  valley  of  the  Arkansas  led 
outward  to  New  Spain,  yet  other  pathways  made 
out  from  the  Mississippi  River  into  the  unknown 
lands.  The  Missouri  was  the  first  and  last  of 
our  great  natural  frontier  roads.  Its  lower  course 
swept  along  the  eastern  edge  of  the  Plains,  far  to 
the  south,  down  to  the  very  doors  of  the  most  ad- 
venturous settlements  in  the  Mississippi  Valley. 
Those  who  dared  its  stained  and  turbulent  current 
had  to  push  up,  onward,  northward,  past  the 
mouth  of  the  Platte,  far  to  the  north  across  degrees 
of  latitude,  steadily  forward  through  a  vast  virgin 
land.  Then  the  river  bent  boldly  and  strongly 
off  to  the  west,  across  another  empire.  Its  great 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         89 

falls  indicated  that  it  headed  high;  beyond  the 
great  falls  its  steady  sweep  westward  and  at  last 
southward,  led  into  yet  other  kingdoms. 

When  we  travel  by  horse  or  by  modern  motor 
car  in  that  now  accessible  region  and  look  about 
us,  we  should  not  fail  to  reflect  on  the  long  trail 
of  the  upbound  boats  which  Manuel  Lisa  and 
other  traders  sent  out  almost  immediately  upon 
the  return  of  the  Lewis  and  Clark  expedition.  We 
should  see  them  struggling  up  against  that  tre- 
mendous current  before  steam  was  known,  driven 
by  their  lust  for  new  lands.  We  may  then 
understand  fully  what  we  have  read  of  the  enter- 
prises of  the  old  American  Fur  Company,  and 
bring  to  mind  the  forgotten  names  of  Campbell 
and  Sublette,  of  General  Ashley  and  of  Wyeth 
—  names  to  be  followed  by  others  really  of  less 
importance,  as  those  of  Bonne ville  and  Fremont. 
That  there  could  be  farms,  that  there  ever  might 
be  homes,  in  this  strange  wild  country,  was,  to 
these  early  adventurers,  unthinkable. 

Then  we  should  picture  the  millions  of  buffalo 
which  once  covered  these  plains  and  think  of  the 
waste  and  folly  of  their  slaughtering.  We  should 
see  the  long  streams  of  the  Mackinaw  boats  swim- 
ming down  the  Missouri,  bound  for  St.  Louis, 


90       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

laden  with  bales  of  buffalo  and  beaver  peltry,  every 
pound  of  which  would  be  worth  ten  dollars  at  the 
capital  of  the  fur  trade;  and  we  should  restore 
to  our  minds  the  old  pictures  of  savage  tribes- 
men, decked  in  fur-trimmed  war-shirts  and  plumed 
bonnets,  armed  with  lance  and  sinewed  bow  and 
bull-neck  shield,  not  forgetting  whence  they  got 
their  horses  and  how  they  got  their  food. 

The  great  early  mid-continental  highway,  known 
as  the  Oregon  Trail  or  the  Overland  Trail,  was  by 
way  of  the  Missouri  up  the  Platte  Valley,  thence 
across  the  mountains.  We  know  more  of  this  route 
because  it  was  not  discontinued,  but  came  steadily 
more  and  more  into  use,  for  one  reason  after  an- 
other. The  fur  traders  used  it,  the  Forty-Niners 
used  it,  the  cattlemen  used  it  in  part,  the  railroads 
used  it;  and,  lastly,  the  settlers  and  farmers  used 
it  most  of  all. 

in  physical  features  the  Platte  River  route  was 
similar  to  that  of  the  Arkansas  Valley.  Each 
at  its  eastern  extremity,  for  a  few  days'  travel, 
passed  over  the  rolling  grass-covered  and  flower- 
besprinkled  prairies  ere  it  broke  into  the  high 
and  dry  lands  of  the  Plains,  with  their  green  or 
grey  or  brown  covering  of  practically  flowerless 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         91 

short  grasses.  But  between  the  two  trails  of  the 
Arkansas  and  the  Platte  there  existed  certain  wide 
differences.  At  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury the  two  trails  were  quite  distinct  in  personnel, 
if  that  word  may  be  used.  The  Santa  Fe  Trail 
showed  Spanish  influences;  that  of  the  Platte  Val- 
ley remained  far  more  nearly  American. 

Thus  far  the  frontier  had  always  been  altering 
the  man  who  came  to  it;  and,  indirectly,  always 
altering  those  who  dwelt  back  of  the  frontier, 
nearer  to  the  Appalachians  or  the  Atlantic.  A 
new  people  now  was  in  process  of  formation — a 
people  born  of  a  new  environment.  America  and 
the  American  were  conceiving.  There  was  soon  to 
be  born,  soon  swiftly  to  grow,  a  new  and  lasting 
type  of  man.  Man  changes  an  environment  only 
by  bringing  into  it  new  or  better  transportation. 
Environment  changes  man.  Here  in  the  mid- 
continent,  at  the  mid-century,  the  frontier  and 
the  ways  of  the  frontier  were  writing  their  im- 
print on  the  human  product  of  our  land. 

The  first  great  caravans  of  the  Platte  Valley, 
when  the  wagon-trains  went  out  hundreds  strong, 
were  not  the  same  as  the  scattering  cavalcade  of 
the  fur  hunters,  not  the  same  as  the  ox-trains 
and  mule-trains  of  the  Santa  Fe  traffic.  The 


92       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

men  who  wore  deepest  tlie  wheel  marks  of  the 
Oregon  Trail  were  neither  trading  nor  trapping 
men,  but  home-building  men  —  the  first  real  emi- 
grants to  go  West  with  the  intent  of  making  homes 
beyond  the  Rockies. 

The  Oregon  Trail  had  been  laid  out  by  the 
explorers  of  the  fur  trade.  Zealous  missionaries 
had  made  their  way  over  the  trail  in  the  thirties. 
The  Argonauts  of  '49  passed  over  it  and  left  it 
only  after  crossing  the  Rockies.  But,  before  gold 
in  California  was  dreamed  of,  there  had  come  back 
to  the  States  reports  of  lands  rich  in  resources 
other  than  gold,  lying  in  the  far  Northwest, 
beyond  the  great  mountain  ranges;  and,  before 
the  Forty-Niners  were  heard  of,  farmers,  home- 
builders,  emigrants,  men  with  their  families, 
men  with  their  household  goods,  were  steadily 
passing  out  for  the  far-off  and  unknown  country 
of  Oregon. 

The  Oregon  Trail  was  the  pathway  for  Fremont 
in  1842,  perhaps  the  most  overvalued  explorer 
of  all  the  West;  albeit  this  comment  may  to  some 
seem  harsh.  Kit  Carson  and  Bill  Williams  led 
Fremont  across  the  Rockies  almost  by  the  hand. 
Carson  and  Williams  themselves  had  been  taken 
across  by  the  Indian  tribes.  But  Fremont  could 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         93 

write;  and  the  story  which  he  set  down  of  his  first 
expedition  inflamed  the  zeal  of  all.  Men  began 
to  head  out  for  that  far-away  country  beyond  the 
Rockies.  Not  a  few  scattered  bands,  but  very 
many,  passed  up  the  valley  of  the  Platte.  There 
began  a  tremendous  trek  of  thousands  of  men 
who  wanted  homes  somewhere  out  beyond  the 
frontier.  And  that  was  more  than  ten  years 
before  the  Civil  War.  The  cow  trade  was  not 
dreamed  of;  the  coming  cow  country  was  over- 
leaped and  ignored. 

Our  national  horizon  extended  immeasurably 
along  that  dusty  way.  In  the  use  of  the  Oregon 
Trail  we  first  began  to  be  great.  The  chief 
figure  of  the  American  West,  the  figure  of  the 
ages,  is  not  the  long-haired,  fringed-legging  man 
riding  a  raw-boned  pony,  but  the  gaunt  and 
sad-faced  woman  sitting  on  the  front  seat  of 
the  wagon,  following  her  lord  where  he  might 
lead,  her  face  hidden  in  the  same  ragged  sun- 
bonnet  which  had  crossed  the  Appalachians  and 
the  Missouri  long  before.  That  was  America, 
my  brethren!  There  was  the  seed  of  America's 
wealth.  There  was  the  great  romance  of  all 
America  —  the  woman  in  the  sunbonnet;  and 
not,  after  all,  the  hero  with  the  rifle  across  his 


94       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

saddle  horn.     Who  has  written  her  story?    Who 
has  painted  her  picture? 

They  were  large  days,  those  of  the  great  Ore- 
gon Trail,  not  always  pleasingly  dramatic,  but 
oftentimes  tragic  and  terrible.  We  speak  of  the 
Oregon  Trail,  but  it  means  little  to  us  today; 
nor  will  any  mere  generalities  ever  make  it  mean 
much  to  us.  But  what  did  it  mean  to  the  men 
and  women  of  that  day?  What  and  who  were 
those  men  and  women?  What  did  it  mean  to 
take  the  Overland  Trail  in  the  great  adventure 
of  abandoning  forever  the  known  and  the  safe 
and  setting  out  for  Oregon  or  California  at  a 
time  when  everything  in  the  far  West  was  new 
and  unknown?  How  did  those  good  folk  travel? 
Why  and  whither  did  they  travel? 

There  is  a  book  done  by  C.  F.  McGlashan,  a 
resident  of  Truckee,  California,  known  as  The 
History  of  the  Donner  Party,  holding  a  great  deal 
of  actual  history.  McGlashan,  living  close  to 
Donner  Lake,  wrote  in  1879,  describing  scenes 
with  which  he  was  perfectly  familiar,  and  recount- 
ing facts  which  he  had  from  direct  association 
with  participants  in  the  ill-fated  Donner  Party. 
He  chronicles  events  which  happened  in  1846  — 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         95 

a  date  before  the  discovery  of  gold  in  California. 
The  Donner  Party  was  one  of  the  typical  Ameri- 
can caravans  of  homeseekers  who  started  for  the 
Pacific  Slope  with  no  other  purpose  than  that  of 
founding  homes  there,  and  with  no  expectation 
of  sudden  wealth  to  be  gained  in  the  mines.  I 
desire  therefore  to  quote  largely  from  the  pages 
of  this  book,  believing  that,  in  this  fashion,  we 
shall  come  upon  history  of  a  fundamental  sort, 
which  shall  make  us  acquainted  with  the  men  and 
women  of  that  day,  with  the  purposes  and  the 
ambitions  which  animated  them,  and  with  the 
hardships  which  they  encountered. 

The  States  along  the  Mississippi  were  but  sparsely 
settled  in  1846,  yet  the  fame  of  the  fruitfulness,  the 
healthfulness,  and  the  almost  tropical  beauty  of  the 
land  bordering  the  Pacific,  tempted  the  members 
of  the  Donner  Party  to  leave  their  homes.  These 
homes  were  situated  in  Illinois,  Iowa,  Tennessee, 
Missouri,  and  Ohio.  Families  from  each  of  these 
States  joined  the  train  and  participated  in  its  terrible 
fate;  yet  the  party  proper  was  organized  in  Sangamon 
County,  Illinois,  by  George  and  Jacob  Donner  and 
James  F.  Reed.  Early  in  April,  1846,  the  party  set 
out  from  Springfield,  Illinois,  and  by  the  first  week 
in  May  reached  Independence,  Missouri.  Here  the 
party  was  increased  by  additional  members,  and  the 
train  comprised  about  one  hundred  persons.  .  .  . 


96       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

In  the  party  were  aged  fathers  with  their  trusting 
families  about  them,  mothers  whose  very  lives  were 
wrapped  up  in  their  children,  men  in  the  prime  and 
vigor  of  manhood,  maidens  in  all  the  sweetness  and 
freshness  of  budding  womanhood,  children  full  of 
glee  and  mirthfulness,  and  babes  nestling  on  mater- 
nal breasts.  Lovers  there  were,  to  whom  the  journey 
was  tinged  with  rainbow  hues  of  joy  and  happiness, 
and  strong,  manly  hearts  whose  constant  support 
and  encouragement  was  the  memory  of  dear  ones 
left  behind  in  homeland. 

The  wonderment  which  all  experience  in  viewing 
the  scenery  along  the  line  of  the  old  emigrant  road 
was  peculiarly  vivid  to  these  people.  Few  descriptions 
had  been  given  of  the  route,  and  all  was  novel  an^ 
unexpected.  In  later  years  the  road  was  broadly  and 
deeply  marked,  and  good  camping  grounds  were  dis- 
tinctly indicated.  The  bleaching  bones  of  cattle  that 
had  perished,  or  the  broken  fragments  of  wagons  or 
castaway  articles,  were  thickly  strewn  on  either  side  of 
the  highway.  But  in  1846  the  way  was  through  almost 
trackless  valleys  waving  with  grass,  along  rivers  where 
few  paths  were  visible,  save  those  made  by  the  feet  of 
buffalo  and  antelope,  and  over  mountains  and  plains 
where  little  more  than  the  westward  course  of  the  sun 
guided  the  travelers.  Trading-posts  were  stationed  at 
only  a  few  widely  distant  points,  and  rarely  did  the 
party  meet  with  any  human  beings,  save  wandering 
bands  of  Indians.  Yet  these  first  days  are  spoken  of 
by  all  of  the  survivors  as  being  crowned  with  peace- 
ful enjoyment  and  pleasant  anticipations.  There  were 
beautiful  flowers  by  the  roadside,  an  abundance  of 
game  in  the  meadows  and  mountains,  and  at  night 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         97 

there  were  singing,  dancing,  and  innocent  plays.  Sev- 
eral musical  instruments,  and  many  excellent  voices, 
were  in  the  party,  and  the  kindliest  feeling  and  good- 
fellowship  prevailed  among  the  members. 

The  formation  of  the  company  known  as  the  Donner 
Party  was  purely  accidental.  The  union  of  so  many 
emigrants  into  one  train  was  not  occasioned  by  any  pre- 
concerted arrangement.  Many  composing  the  Donner 
Party  were  not  aware,  at  the  outset,  that  such  a  tide 
of  emigration  was  sweeping  to  California.  In  many 
instances  small  parties  would  hear  of  the  mammoth 
train  just  ahead  of  them  or  just  behind  them,  and  by 
hastening  their  pace,  or  halting  for  a  few  days,  joined 
themselves  to  the  party.  Many  were  with  the  train 
during  a  portion  of  the  journey,  but  from  some  cause 
or  other  became  parted  from  the  Donner  company 
before  reaching  Donner  Lake.  Soon  after  the  train 
left  Independence  it  contained  between  two  and  three 
hundred  wagons,  and  when  in  motion  was  two  miles  in 
length.  The  members  of  the  party  proper  numbered 
ninety. 


This  caravan,  like  many  others  of  the  great 
assemblage  westbound  at  that  time,  had  great 
extremes  in  personnel.  Some  were  out  for  mere 
adventure;  some  were  single  men  looking  for  a 
location.  Most  of  them  were  fathers  of  families, 
among  them  several  persons  of  considerable  means 
and  of  good  standing  in  the  community  which 
they  were  leaving.  While  we  may  suppose  that 


98       THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

most  of  them  were  folk  of  no  extraordinary  sort, 
certainly  some  were  persons  of  education  and  in- 
telligence. Among  these  was  the  wife  of  George 
Donner  —  Tamsen  Donner,  a  woman  of  education, 
a  musician,  a  linguist,  a  botanist,  and  of  the  most 
sublime  heroism. 

Tamsen  Donner  sent  back  now  and  then  along 
the  route  some  story  of  the  daily  doings  of  the  cara- 
van; and  such  letters  as  these  are  of  the  utmost 
interest  to  any  who  desire  precise  information  of 
that  time.  It  would  seem  that  the  emigrants  them- 
selves for  a  great  part  of  their  route  met  with  no 
great  adventures,  nor  indeed,  appeared  to  be  under- 
taking any  unusual  affair.  They  followed  a  route 
up  the  Platte  Valley  already  long  known  to  those 
of  the  eastern  settlements. 

NEAR    THE    JUNCTION    OF   THE    NORTH 

AND  SOUTH  PLATTE,  June  16,  1846. 

MY  OLD  FRIEND:  We  are  now  on  the  Platte,  two 
hundred  miles  from  Fort  Laramie.  Our  journey  so 
far  has  been  pleasant,  the  roads  have  been  good,  and 
food  plentiful.  The  water  for  part  of  the  way  has  been 
indifferent,  but  at  no  time  have  our  cattle  suffered  for 
it.  Wood  is  now  very  scarce,  but  "buffalo  chips"  are 
excellent;  they  kindle  quickly  and  retain  heat  surpris- 
ingly. We  had  this  morning  buffalo  steaks  broiled 
upon  them  that  had  the  same  flavor  they  would  have 
had  upon  hickory  coals. 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST         99 

We  feel  no  fear  of  Indians;  our  cattle  graze  quietly 
around  our  encampment  unmolested.  Two  or  three 
men  will  go  hunting  twenty  miles  from  camp;  and  last 
night  two  of  our  men  lay  out  in*  the  wilderness  rather 
than  ride  their  horses  after  a  hard  chase. 

Indeed,  if  I  do  not  experience  something  far  worse 
than  I  have  yet  done,  I  shall  say  the  trouble  is  all  in 
getting  started.  Our  wagons  have  not  needed  much 
repair,  and  I  can  not  yet  tell  in  what  respects  they 
could  be  improved.  Certain  it  is,  they  can  not  be  too 
strong.  Our  preparations  for  the  journey  might  have 
been  in  some  respects  bettered. 

Bread  has  been  the  principal  article  of  food  in  our 
camp.  We  laid  in  one  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  of 
flour  and  seventy-five  pounds  of  meat  for  each  in- 
dividual, and  I  fear  bread  will  be  scarce.  Meat  is 
abundant.  Rice  and  beans  are  good  articles  on  the 
road;  cornmeal  too,  is  acceptable.  Linsey  dresses  are 
the  most  suitable  for  children.  Indeed,  if  I  had  one, 
it  would  be  acceptable.  There  is  so  cool  a  breeze  at 
all  times  on  the  Plains  that  the  sun  does  not  feel  so 
hot  as  one  would  suppose. 

We  are  now  four  hundred  and  fifty  miles  from 
Independence.  Our  route  at  first  was  rough,  and 
through  a  timbered  country,  which  appeared  to  be 
fertile.  After  striking  the  prairie,  we  found  a  first- 
rate  road,  and  the  only  difficulty  we  have  had,  has 
been  in  crossing  the  creeks.  In  that,  however,  there 
has  been  no  danger. 

I  never  could  have  believed  we  could  have  traveled 
so  far  with  so  little  difficulty.  The  prairie  between  the 
Blue  and  the  Platte  Rivers  is  beautiful  beyond  descrip- 
tion. Never  have  I  seen  so  varied  a  country,  so  suit- 


100     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

able  for  cultivation.  Everything  is  new  and  pleasing; 
the  Indians  frequently  come  to  see  us,  and  the  chiefs 
of  a  tribe  breakfasted  at  our  tent  this  morning.  All 
are  so  friendly  that  I  can  not  help  feeling  sympathy 
and  friendship  for  them.  But  on  one  sheet  what  can 
I  say? 

Since  we  have  been  on  the  Platte,  we  have  had  the 
river  on  one  side  and  the  ever  varying  mounds  on  the 
other,  and  have  traveled  through  the  bottom  lands 
from  one  to  two  miles  wide,  with  little  or  no  timber. 
The  soil  is  sandy,  and  last  year,  on  account  of  the  dry 
season,  the  emigrants  found  grass  here  scarce.  Our 
cattle  are  in  good  order,  and  when  proper  care  has 
been  taken,  none  have  been  lost.  Our  milch  cows 
have  been  of  great  service,  indeed.  They  have  been 
of  more  advantage  than  our  meat.  We  have  plenty 
of  butter  and  milk. 

We  are  commanded  by  Captain  Russell,  an  amiable 
man.  George  Donner  is  himself  yet.  He  crows  in 
the  morning  and  shouts  out,  "Chain  up,  boys  —  chain 
up, "  with  as  much  authority  as  though  he  was  "  some- 
thing in  particular."  John  Denton  is  still  with  us. 
We  find  him  useful  in  the  camp.  Hiram  Miller  and 
Noah  James  are  in  good  health  and  doing  well.  We 
have  of  the  best  people  in  our  company,  and  some,  too, 
that  are  not  so  good. 

Buffalo  show  themselves  frequently.  We  have  found 
the  wild  tulip,  the  primrose,  the  lupine,  the  eardrop, 
the  larkspur,  and  creeping  hollyhock,  and  a  beautiful 
flower  resembling  the  bloom  of  the  beech  tree,  but  in 
bunches  as  large  as  a  small  sugarloaf,  and  of  every 
variety  of  shade,  to  red  and  green. 

I  botanize,  and  read  some,  but  cook  "heaps'*  more. 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST       101 

There  are  four  hundred  and  twenty  wagons,  as  far  as 
we  have  heard,  on  the  road  between  here  and  Oregon 
and  California. 

Give  our  love  to  all  inquiring  friends.  God  bless 
them. 

Yours  truly, 

MRS.  GEORGE  DONNEB. 

By  the  Fourth  of  July  the  Dormer  Party  had 
reached  Fort  Laramie.  They  pushed  on  west 
over  the  old  trail  up  the  Sweetwater  River  and 
across  the  South  Pass,  the  easiest  of  all  the  moun- 
tain passes  known  to  the  early  travelers.  With- 
out much  adventure  they  reached  Fort  Bridger, 
then  only  a  trading-post.  Here  occurred  the  fatal 
mistake  of  the  Donner  Party. 

Some  one  at  the  fort  strongly  advised  them  to 
take  a  new  route,  a  cut-off  said  to  shorten  the 
distance  by  about  three  hundred  miles.  This 
cut-off  passed  along  the  south  shore  of  Great 
Salt  Lake  and  caught  up  the  old  California  Trail 
from  Fort  Hall  —  then  well  established  and  well 
known  —  along  the  Humboldt  River.  The  great 
Donner  caravan  delayed  for  some  days  at  Fort 
Bridger,  hesitating  over  the  decision  of  which 
route  to  follow.  The  party  divided.  All  those 
who  took  the  old  road  north  of  Salt  Lake  by 
way  of  Fort  Hall  reached  California  in  complete 


102      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

safety.  Of  the  original  Dormer  Party  there  re- 
mained eighty-seven  persons.  All  of  these  took 
the  cut-off,  being  eager  to  save  time  in  their 
travel.  They  reached  Salt  Lake  after  unspeak- 
able difficulties.  Farther  west,  in  the  deserts  of 
Nevada,  they  lost  many  of  their  cattle. 

Now  began  among  the  party  dissensions  and 
grumblings.  The  story  is  a  long  one.  It  reached 
its  tragic  denouement  just  below  the  summit 
of  the  Sierras,  on  the  shores  of  Donner  Lake. 
The  words  of  McGlashan  may  now  best  serve 
our  purpose. 

Generally,  the  ascent  of  the  Sierra  brought  joy 
and  gladness  to  weary  overland  emigrants.  To  the 
Donner  Party  it  brought  terror  and  dismay.  The 
company  had  hardly  obtained  a  glimpse  of  the  moun- 
tains, ere  the  winter  storm  clouds  began  to  assemble 
their  hosts  around  the  loftier  crests.  Every  day  the 
weather  appeared  more  ominous  and  threatening. 
The  delay  at  the  Truckee  Meadows  had  been  brief, 
but  every  day  ultimately  cost  a  dozen  lives.  On  the 
twenty-third  of  October,  they  became  thoroughly 
alarmed  at  the  angry  heralds  of  the  gathering  storm, 
and  with  all  haste  resumed  the  journey.  It  was  too 
late!  At  Prosser  Creek,  three  miles  below  Truckee, 
they  found  themselves  encompassed  with  six  inches  of 
snow.  On  the  summits,  the  snow  was  from  two 
to  five  feet  in  depth.  This  was  October  28,  1846. 
Almost  a  month  earlier  than  usual,  the  Sierra  had 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST        103 

donned  its  mantle  of  ice  and  snow.    The  party  were 
prisoners! 

All  was  consternation.  The  ^wildest  confusion  pre- 
vailed. In  their  eagerness,  many  went  far  in  advance 
of  the  main  train.  There  was  little  concert  of  action 
or  harmony  of  plan.  All  did  not  arrive  at  Donner 
Lake  the  same  day.  Some  wagons  and  families  did 
not  reach  the  lake  until  the  thirty-first  day  of  October, 
some  never  went  farther  than  Prosser  Creek,  while 
others,  on  the  evening  of  the  twenty-ninth,  struggled 
through  the  snow,  and  reached  the  foot  of  the  precipi- 
tous cliffs  between  the  summit  and  the  upper  end  of  the 
lake.  Here,  baffled,  wearied,  disheartened,  they  turned 
back  to  the  foot  of  the  lake. 

These  emigrants  did  not  lack  in  health,  strength, 
or  resolution,  but  here  they  were  in  surroundings 
absolutely  new  to  them.  A  sort  of  panic  seized 
them  now.  They  scattered;  their  organization 
disintegrated.  All  thought  of  conjoint  action,  of 
a  social  compact,  a  community  of  interests,  seems 
to  have  left  them.  It  was  a  history  of  every  man 
for  himself,  or  at  least  every  family  for  itself* 
All  track  of  the  road  was  now  lost  under  the  snow. 
At  the  last  pitch  up  to  the  summit  of  the  Sierras 
precipitous  cliffs  abounded.  No  one  knew  the 
way.  And  now  the  snows  came  once  again. 

The  emigrants  suffered  a  thousand  deaths.  The 
pitiless  snow  came  down  in  large,  steady  masses.  All 


104      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

understood  that  the  storm  meant  death.  One  of  the 
Indians  silently  wrapped  his  blanket  about  him  and 
in  deepest  dejection  seated  himself  beside  a  tall  pine. 
In  this  position  he  passed  the  entire  night,  only  moving 
occasionally  to  keep  from  being  covered  with  snow. 
Mrs.  Reed  spread  down  a  shawl,  placed  her  four  chil- 
dren —  Virginia,  Patty,  James,  and  Thomas  —  thereon, 
and  putting  another  shawl  over  them,  sat  by  the  side 
of  her  babies  during  all  the  long  hours  of  darkness. 
Every  little  while  she  was  compelled  to  lift  the  upper 
shawl  and  shake  off  the  rapidly  accumulating  snow. 

With  slight  interruptions,  the  storm  continued 
several  days.  The  mules  and  oxen  that  had  always 
hovered  about  camp  were  blinded  and  bewildered  by 
the  storm,  and  straying  away  were  literally  buried  alive 
in  the  drifts.  What  pen  can  describe  the  horror  of  the 
position  in  which  the  emigrants  found  themselves?  It 
was  impossible  to  move  through  the  deep,  soft  snow 
without  the  greatest  effort.  The  mules  were  gone,  and 
were  never  found.  Most  of  the  cattle  had  perished, 
and  were  wholly  hidden  from  sight.  The  few  oxen 
which  were  found  were  slaughtered  for  beef. 

The  travelers  knew  that  the  supplies  they  had 
could  not  last  long.  On  the  12th  of  November  a 
relief  party  essayed  to  go  forward,  but  after  strug- 
gling a  short  distance  toward  the  summit,  came 
back  wearied  and  broken-hearted,  unable  to  make 
way  through  the  deep,  soft  snow.  Then  some  one 
—  said  to  have  been  F.  W.  Graves  of  Vermont  — 
bethought  himself  of  making  snowshoes  out  of 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST        105 

the  oxbows  and  the  hides  of  the  slaughtered  oxen. 
With  these  they  did  better. 

Volunteers  were  called  for*  yet  another  party 
to  cross  the  mountains  into  California.  Fifteen 
persons  volunteered.  Not  all  of  them  were  men 
—  some  were  mothers,  and  one  was  a  young  wo- 
man. Their  mental  condition  was  little  short  of 
desperation.  Only,  in  the  midst  of  their  intense 
hardships  it  seemed  to  all,  somewhere  to  the  west- 
ward was  California,  and  that  there  alone  lay  any 
hope.  The  party  traveled  four  miles  the  first  day; 
and  their  camp  fires  were  visible  below  the  sum- 
mit. The  next  day  they  traveled  six  miles  and 
crossed  the  divide. 

They  were  starving,  cold,  worn  out,  their  feet 
frozen  to  bursting,  their  blood  chilled.  At  times 
they  were  caught  in  some  of  the  furious  storms 
of  the  Sierras.  They  did  not  know  their  way. 
On  the  27th  of  December  certain  of  the  party 
resolved  themselves  to  that  last  recourse  which 
alone  might  mean  life.  Surrounded  by  horrors 
as  they  were,  it  seemed  they  could  endure  the 
thought  of  yet  an  additional  horror.  .  .  .  There 
were  the  dead,  the  victims  who  already  had  per- 
ished! .  .  . 

Seven  of  the  fifteen  got  through  to  the  Sacra- 


106      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

mento  Valley,  among  these  the  young  girl,  Mary 
Graves,  described  as  "a  very  beautiful  girl,  of 
tall  and  slender  build,  and  exceptionally  graceful 
character."  The  story  brought  out  by  these 
survivors  of  the  first  party  to  cross  the  Sierras 
from  the  starving  camp  set  all  California  aflame. 
There  were  no  less  than  three  relief  expeditions 
formed,  which  at  varying  dates  crossed  the  moun- 
tains to  the  east.  Some  men  crossed  the  snow  belt 
five  times  in  all.  The  rescuers  were  often  in  as 
much  danger  as  the  victims  they  sought  to  save. 

And  they  could  not  save  them.  Back  there  in 
their  tents  and  hovels  around  Donner  Lake 
starvation  was  doing  its  work  steadily.  There  is 
contemporary  history  also  covering  the  details 
of  this.  Tamsen  Donner,  heroine  that  she  was, 
kept  a  diary  which  would  have  been  valuable 
for  us,  but  this  was  lost  along  with  her  paint- 
ings and  her  botanical  collections.  The  best  pre- 
served diary  is  that  of  Patrick  Breen,  done  in 
simple  and  matter-of-fact  fashion  throughout 
most  of  the  starving  winter.  Thus: 

Dec.  17.  Pleasant;  William  Murphy  returned  from 
the  mountain  party  last  evening;  Baylis  Williams  died 
night  before  last;  Milton  and  Noah  started  for  Don- 
ner's  eight  days  ago;  not  returned  yet;  think  they  are 
lost  in  the  snow. 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST        107 

Dec.  21.  Milton  got  back  last  night  from  Donner's 
camp.  Sad  news;  Jacob  Donner,  Samuel  Shoemaker, 
Rhineheart,  and  Smith  are  dead;  the  rest  of  them  in  a 
low  situation;  snowed  all  night,  with  a  strong  southwest 
wind. 

Dec.  23.  Clear  to-day;  Milton  took  some  of  his 
meat  away;  all  well  at  their  camp.  Began  this  day  to 
read  the  "Thirty  Days'  Prayers";  Almighty  God, 
grant  the  requests  of  unworthy  sinners ! 

Jan.  13.  Snowing  fast;  snow  higher  than  the  shanty; 
it  must  be  thirteen  feet  deep.  Can  not  get  wood  this 
morning;  it  is  a  dreadful  sight  for  us  to  look  upon. 

Jan.  27.  Commenced  snowing  yesterday;  still  con- 
tinues today.  Lewis  Keseberg,  Jr.,  died  three  days 
ago;  food  growing  scarce;  don't  have  fire  enough  to 
cook  our  hides. 

Jan.  31.  The  sun  does  not  shine  out  brilliant  this 
morning;  froze  hard  last  night;  wind  northwest.  Lan- 
drum  Murphy  died  last  night  about  ten  o'clock;  Mrs. 
Reed  went  to  Graves's  this  morning  to  look  after  goods. 

Feb.  4.  Snowed  hard  until  twelve  o'clock  last 
night;  many  uneasy  for  fear  we  shall  all  perish  with 
hunger;  we  have  but  little  meat  left,  and  only  three 
hides;  Mrs.  Reed  has  nothing  but  one  hide,  and  that 
is  on  Graves's  house;  Milton  lives  there,  and  likely  will 
keep  that.  Eddy's  child  died  last  night. 

Feb.  7.  Ceased  to  snow  at  last;  today  it  is  quite 
pleasant.  McCutchen's  child  died  on  the  second  of  this 
month. 

[This  child  died  and  was  buried  in  the  Graves's  cabin. 
Mr.  W.  C.  Graves  helped  dig  the  grave  near  one  side 
of  the  cabin,  and  laid  the  little  one  to  rest.  One  of 


108     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

the  most  heart-rending  features  of  this  Donner  tragedy 
is  the  number  of  infants  that  perished.  Mrs.  Breen, 
Mrs.  Pike,  Mrs.  Foster,  Mrs.  McCutchen,  Mrs.  Eddy, 
and  Mrs.  Graves  each  had  nursing  babes  when  the  fatal 
camp  was  pitched  at  Donner  Lake.] 

Feb.  8.  Fine,  clear  morning.  Spitzer  died  last 
night,  and  we  will  bury  him  in  the  snow;  Mrs.  Eddy 
died  on  the  night  of  the  seventh. 

Feb.  9.  Mrs.  Pike's  child  all  but  dead;  Milton  is  at 
Murphy's,  not  able  to  get  out  of  bed;  Mrs.  Eddy  and 
child  buried  today;  wind  southeast. 

Feb.  10.  Beautiful  morning;  thawing  in  the  sun; 
Milton  Elliott  died  last  night  at  Murphy's  cabin, 
and  Mrs.  Reed  went  there  this  morning  to  see  about 
his  effects.  John  Denton  trying  to  borrow  meat  for 
Graves;  had  none  to  give;  they  had  nothing  but  hides; 
all  are  entirely  out  of  meat,  but  a  little  we  have;  our 
hides  are  nearly  all  eat  up,  but  with  God's  help  spring 
will  soon  smile  upon  us. 

There  was  one  survivor  of  the  camp  at  Donner 
Lake,  a  man  named  Lewis  Keseberg,  of  German 
descent.  That  he  was  guilty  of  repeated  canni- 
balism cannot  be  doubted.  It  was  in  his  cabin 
that,  after  losing  all  her  loved  ones,  the  heroic 
Tamsen  Donner  met  her  end.  Many  thought 
he  killed  her  for  the  one  horrid  purpose.1 

1  Many  years  later  (1879)  Keseberg  declared  under  oath  to  C.  F. 
McGlashan  that  he  did  not  take  her  life.  See  History  of  the  Donner 
Party,  pp.  212.  213. 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST        109 

Such  then  is  the  story  of  one  of  the  great  emi- 
grant parties  who  started  West  on  a  hazard  of  new 
fortunes  in  the  early  days  of  the  Oregon  Trail. 
Happily  there  has  been  no  parallel  to  the  mis- 
adventures of  this  ill-fated  caravan.  It  is  difficult 
—  without  reading  these  bald  and  awful  details  — 
to  realize  the  vast  difference  between  that  day 
and  this.  Today  we  may  by  the  gentle  stages  of 
a  pleasant  railway  journey  arrive  at  Donner  Lake. 
Little  trace  remains,  nor  does  any  kindly  soul 
wish  for  more  definite  traces,  of  those  awful 
scenes.  Only  a  cross  here  and  there  with  a  leg- 
end, faint  and  becoming  fainter  every  year,  may 
be  seen,  marking  the  more  prominent  spots  of  the 
historic  starving  camp. 

Up  on  the  high  mountain  side,  for  the  most 
part  hid  in  the  forest,  lie  the  snowsheds  and  tun- 
nels of  the  railway,  now  encountering  its  stiffest 
climb  up  the  steep  slopes  to  the  summit  of  the 
Sierras.  The  author  visited  this  spot  of  melan- 
choly history  in  company  with  the  vice-president 
of  the  great  railway  line  which  here  swings  up  so 
steadily  and  easily  over  the  Sierras.  Bit  by  bit 
we  checked  out  as  best  we  might  the  fateful  spots 
mentioned  in  the  story  of  the  Donner  Party.  A 
splendid  motor  highway  runs  by  the  lakeside  now. 


110     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

While  we  halted  our  own  car  there,  a  motor 
car  drove  up  from  the  westward  —  following  that 
practical  automobile  highway  which  now  exists 
from  the  plains  of  California  across  the  Sierras 
and  east  over  precisely  that  trail  where  once  the 
weary  feet  of  the  oxen  dragged  the  wagons  of 
the  early  emigrants.  It  was  a  small  car  of  no 
expensive  type.  It  was  loaded  down  with  camp- 
ing equipment  until  the  wheels  scarcely  could  be 
seen.  It  carried  five  human  occupants  —  an  Iowa 
farmer  and  his  family.  They  had  been  out  to 
California  for  a  season.  Casually  they  had  left 
Los  Angeles,  had  traveled  north  up  the  valleys  of 
California,  east  across  the  summit  of  the  Sierras, 
and  were  here  now  bound  for  Iowa  over  the  old 
emigrant  trail! 

We  hailed  this  new  traveler  on  the  old  trail. 
I  do  not  know  whether  or  not  he  had  any  idea  of 
the  early  days  of  that  great  highway;  I  suspect 
that  he  could  tell  only  of  its  present  motoring 
possibilities.  But  his  wheels  were  passing  over 
the  marks  left  more  than  half  a  century  ago  by 
the  cracked  felloes  of  the  emigrant  wagons  going 
west  in  search  of  homes.  If  we  seek  history,  let 
us  ponder  that  chance  pause  of  the  eastbound 
family,  traveling  by  motor  for  pleasure,  here  by 


THE  PATHWAYS  OF  THE  WEST       111 

the  side  of  the  graves  of  the  travelers  of  another 
day,  itself  so  briefly  gone.  What  an  epoch  was 
spanned  in  the  passing  of  that  frontier! 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  INDIAN  WARS 

IT  might  well  be  urged  against  the  method  em- 
ployed in  these  pages  that,  although  we  under- 
took to  speak  of  the  last  American  frontier,  all 
that  we  really  thus  far  have  done  has  been  to 
describe  a  series  of  frontiers  from  the  Missouri 
westward.  In  part  this  is  true.  But  it  was  pre- 
cisely in  this  large,  loose,  and  irregular  fashion 
that  we  actually  arrived  at  our  last  frontier. 
Certainly  our  westbound  civilization  never  ad- 
vanced by  any  steady  or  regular  process.  It 
would  be  a  singularly  illuminating  map  —  and 
one  which  I  wish  we  might  show  —  which  would 
depict  in  different  colors  the  great  occupied  areas 
of  the  West,  with  the  earliest  dates  of  their  final 
and  permanent  occupation.  Such  a  map  as  this 
would  show  us  that  the  last  frontier  of  America 
was  overleaped  and  left  behind  not  once  but  a 

score  of  times. 

lit 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  113 

The  land  between  the  Missouri  and  the  Rockies, 
along  the  Great  Plains  and  the  high  foothills, 
was  crossed  over  and  forgotten  by  the  men  who 
were  forging  on  into  farther  countries  in  search 
of  lands  where  fortune  was  swift  and  easy.  Cali- 
fornia, Oregon,  all  the  early  farming  and  timber- 
ing lands  of  the  distant  Northwest  —  these  lay  far 
beyond  the  Plains;  and  as  we  have  noted,  they 
were  sought  for,  even  before  gold  was  dreamed  of 
upon  the  Pacific  Slope. 

So  here,  somewhere  between  the  Missouri  and 
the  Rockies,  lay  our  last  frontier,  wavering,  re- 
ceding, advancing,  gaining  and  losing,  changing  a 
little  more  every  decade  —  and  at  last  so  rapidly 
changed  as  to  be  outworn  and  abolished  in  one 
swift  decade  all  its  own. 

This  unsettled  land  so  long  held  in  small  repute 
by  the  early  Americans,  was,  as  we  have  pointed 
out,  the  buffalo-range  and  the  country  of  the 
Horse  Indians  —  the  Plains  tribes  who  lived  upon 
the  buffalo.  For  a  long  time  it  was  this  Indian 
population  which  held  back  the  white  settle- 
ments of  Kansas,  Nebraska,  the  Dakotas,  Mon- 
tana, Wyoming,  Colorado.  But  as  men  began 
to  work  farther  and  farther  westward  in  search 
of  homes  in  Oregon,  or  in  quest  of  gold  in  Call- 


114      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

fornia  or  Idaho  or  Montana,  the  Indian  question 
came  to  be  a  serious  one. 

To  the  Army,  soon  after  the  Civil  War,  fell  the 
task  of  exterminating,  or  at  least  evicting,  the 
savage  tribes  over  all  this  unvalued  and  unknown 
Middle  West.  This  was  a  process  not  altogether 
simple.  For  a  considerable  time  the  Indians 
themselves  were  able  to  offer  very  effective  resist- 
ance to  the  enterprise.  They  were  accustomed 
to  living  upon  that  country,  and  did  not  need 
to  bring  in  their  own  supplies;  hence  the  Army 
fought  them  at  a  certain  disadvantage.  In 
sooth,  the  Army  had  to  learn  to  become  half 
Indian  before  it  could  fight  the  Indians  on  any- 
thing like  even  terms.  We  seem  not  so  much  to 
have  coveted  the  lands  in  the  first  Indian-fighting 
days;  we  fought  rather  for  the  trails  than  for  the 
soil.  The  Indians  themselves  had  lived  there  all 
their  lives,  had  conquered  their  environment,  and 
were  happy  in  it.  They  made  a  bitter  fight;  nor 
are  they  to  be  blamed  for  doing  so. 

The  greatest  of  our  Indian  wars  have  taken  place 
since  our  own  Civil  War;  and  perhaps  the  most 
notable  of  all  the  battles  are  those  which  were 
fought  on  the  old  cow  range  —  in  the  land  of  our 
last  frontier.  We  do  not  lack  abundant  records 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  115 

of  this  time  of  our  history.  Soon  after  the  Civil 
War  the  railroads  began  edging  out  into  the 
Plains.  They  brought,  besides  many  new  set- 
tlers, an  abundance  of  chroniclers  and  historians 
and  writers  of  hectic  fiction  or  supposed  fact.  A 
multitude  of  books  came  out  at  this  time  of  our 
history,  most  of  which  were  accepted  as  truth. 
That  was  the  time  when  we  set  up  as  Wild  West 
heroes  rough  skin-clad  hunters  and  so-called 
scouts,  each  of  whom  was  allowed  to  tell  his  own 
story  and  to  have  it  accepted  at  par.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  at  about  the  time  the  Army  had  succeeded 
in  subduing  the  last  of  the  Indian  tribes  on  the 
buffalo-range,  the  most  of  our  Wild  West  history, 
at  least  so  far  as  concerned  the  boldest  adventure, 
was  a  thing  of  the  past.  It  was  easy  to  write 
of  a  past  which  every  one  now  was  too  new,  too 
ignorant,  or  too  busy  critically  to  remember. 

Even  as  early  as  1866,  Colonel  Marcy,  an  ex- 
perienced army  officer  and  Indian-fighter,  took 
the  attitude  of  writing  about  a  vanishing  phase 
of  American  life.  In  his  Army  Life  on  the 
Border,  he  says: 

I  have  been  persuaded  by  many  friends  that  the 
contents  of  the  book  which  is  herewith  presented  to  the 
public  are  not  without  value  as  records  of  a  fast- vanish- 


116      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ing  age,  and  as  truthful  sketches  of  men  of  various 
races  whose  memory  will  shortly  depend  only  on  ro- 
mance, unless  some  one  who  knew  them  shall  undertake 
to  leave  outlines  of  their  peculiar  characteristics.  .  .  . 
I  am  persuaded  that  excuse  may  be  found  in  the  simple 
fact  that  all  these  peoples  of  my  description  —  men, 
conditions  of  life,  races  of  aboriginal  inhabitants  and 
adventurous  hunters  and  pioneers  —  are  passing  away. 
A  few  years  more  and  the  prairie  will  be  transformed 
into  farms.  The  mountain  ravines  will  be  the  abodes 
of  busy  manufacturers,  and  the  gigantic  power  of 
American  civilization  will  have  taken  possession  of  the 
land  from  the  great  river  of  the  West  to  the  very  shores 
of  the  Pacific.  .  .  .  The  world  is  fast  filling  up.  I 
trust  I  am  not  in  error  when  I  venture  to  place  some 
value,  however  small,  on  everything  which  goes  to  form 
the  truthful  history  of  a  condition  of  men  incident  to 
the  advances  of  civilization  over  the  continent  —  a  con- 
dition which  forms  peculiar  types  of  character,  breeds 
remarkable  developments  of  human  nature  —  a  condi- 
tion also  which  can  hardly  again  exist  on  this  or  any 
other  continent,  and  which  has,  therefore,  a  special 
value  in  the  sum  of  human  history. 

Such  words  as  the  foregoing  bespeak  a  large 
and  dignified  point  of  view.  No  one  who  follows 
Marcy's  pages  can  close  them  with  anything  but 
respect  and  admiration.  It  is  in  books  such  as 
this,  then,  that  we  may  find  something  about  the 
last  stages  of  the  clearing  of  the  frontier. 

Even  in  Marcy's   times  the  question  of  our 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  117 

Government's  Indian  policy  was  a  mooted  one. 
He  himself  as  an  Army  officer  looked  at  the 
matter  philosophically,  but  his  estimate  of  con- 
ditions was  exact.  Long  ago  as  he  wrote,  his 
conclusions  were  such  as  might  have  been  given 
forty  years  later. 

The  limits  of  their  accustomed  range  are  rapidly  con- 
tracting, and  their  means  of  subsistence  undergoing  a 
corresponding  diminution.  The  white  man  is  advanc- 
ing with  rapid  strides  upon  all  sides  of  them,  and  they 
are  forced  to  give  way  to  his  encroachments.  The 
time  is  not  far  distant  when  the  buffalo  will  become 
extinct,  and  they  will  then  be  compelled  to  adopt  some 
other  mode  of  life  than  the  chase  for  a  subsistence. 
.  .  .  No  man  will  quietly  submit  to  starvation  when 
food  is  within  his  reach,  and  if  he  cannot  obtain  it 
honestly  he  will  steal  it  or  take  it  by  force.  If,  there- 
fore, we  do  not  induce  them  to  engage  in  agricultural 
avocations  we  shall  in  a  few  years  have  before  us  the 
alternative  of  exterminating  them  or  fighting  them 
perpetually.  That  they  are  destined  ultimately  to 
extinction  does  not  in  my  mind  admit  of  a  doubt. 
For  the  reasons  above  mentioned  it  may  at  first 
be  necessary  for  our  government  to  assert  its  au- 
thority over  them  by  a  prompt  and  vigorous  ex- 
ercise of  the  military  arm.  .  .  .  The  tendency  of  the 
policy  I  have  indicated  will  be  to  assemble  these  peo- 
ple in  communities  where  they  will  be  more  readily 
controlled;  and  I  predict  from  it  the  most  gratifying 
results. 


118     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

Another  well-informed  army  officer,  Colonel 
Richard  Dodge,  himself  a  hunter,  a  trailer,  and 
a  rider  able  to  compete  with  the  savages  in  their 
own  fields,  penetrated  to  the  heart  of  the  Indian 
problem  when  he  wrote: 

The  conception  of  Indian  character  is  almost  im- 
possible to  a  man  who  has  passed  the  greater  portion 
of  his  life  surrounded  by  the  influences  of  a  cultivated, 
refined,  and  moral  society.  .  .  .  The  truth  is  simply 
too  shocking,  and  the  revolted  mind  takes  refuge  in 
disbelief  as  the  less  painful  horn  of  the  dilemma.  As  a 
first  step  toward  an  understanding  of  his  character  we 
must  get  at  his  standpoint  of  morality.  As  a  child  he 
is  not  brought  up.  .  .  .  From  the  dawn  of  intelligence 
his  own  will  is  his  law.  There  is  no  right  and  no  wrong 
to  him.  .  .  .  No  dread  of  punishment  restrains  him 
from  any  act  that  boyish  fun  or  fury  may  prompt. 
No  lessons  inculcating  the  beauty  and  sure  reward  of 
goodness  or  the  hideousness  and  certain  punishment 
of  vice  are  ever  wasted  on  him.  The  men  by  whom 
he  is  surrounded,  and  to  whom  he  looks  as  models  for 
his  future  life,  are  great  and  renowned  just  in  propor- 
tion to  their  ferocity,  to  the  scalps  they  have  taken,  or 
the  thefts  they  have  committed.  His  earliest  boyish 
memory  is  probably  a  dance  of  rejoicing  over  the  scalps 
of  strangers,  all  of  whom  he  is  taught  to  regard  as 
enemies.  The  lessons  of  his  mother  awaken  only  a 
desire  to  take  his  place  as  soon  as  possible  in  fight  and 
foray.  The  instruction  of  his  father  is  only  such  as  is 
calculated  to  fit  him  best  to  act  a  prominent  part  in  the 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  119 

chase,  in  theft,  and  in  murder.  .  .  .  Virtue,  morality, 
generosity,  honor,  are  words  not  only  absolutely  with- 
out significance  to  him,  but  are  not  accurately  trans- 
latable into  any  Indian  language* on  the  Plains. 

These  are  sterner,  less  kindly,  less  philosophic 
words  than  Marcy's,  but  they  keenly  outline 
the  duty  of  the  Army  on  the  frontier.  We  made 
treaties  with  the  Indians  and  broke  them.  In 
turn  men  such  as  these  ignorant  savages  might 
well  be  expected  to  break  their  treaties  also;  and 
they  did.  Unhappily  our  Indian  policy  at  that 
time  was  one  of  mingled  ferocity  and  wheedling. 
The  Indians  did  not  understand  us  any  more  than 
we  did  them.  When  we  withdrew  some  of  the  old 
frontier  posts  from  the  old  hunting-range,  the  ac- 
tion was  construed  by  the  tribesmen  as  an  admis- 
sion that  we  feared  them,  and  they  acted  upon  that 
idea.  In  one  point  of  view  they  had  right  with 
them,  for  now  we  were  moving  out  into  the  last 
of  the  great  buffalo  country.  Their  war  was  one 
of  desperation,  whereas  ours  was  one  of  conquest, 
no  better  and  no  worse  than  all  the  wars  of  con- 
quest by  which  the  strong  have  taken  the  posses- 
sions of  the  weak. 

Our  Army  at  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  and  at 
the  beginning  of  the  wars  with  the  Plains  tribes 


120     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

was  in  better  condition  than  it  has  ever  been  since 
that  day.  It  was  made  up  of  the  soundest  and 
best-seasoned  soldiers  that  ever  fought  under  our 
flag;  and  at  that  time  it  represented  a  greater  pro- 
portion of  our  fighting  strength  than  it  ever  has 
before  or  since.  In  1860  the  Regular  Army,  not 
counting  the  volunteer  forces,  was  16,000.  In 
1870  it  was  37,000  —  one  soldier  to  each  one  thou- 
sand of  our  population. 

Against  this  force,  pioneers  of  the  vaster  ad- 
vancing army  of  peaceful  settlers  now  surging 
West,  there  was  arrayed  practically  all  the  popu- 
lation of  fighting  tribes  such  as  the  Sioux,  the 
two  bands  of  the  Cheyennes,  the  Piegans,  the  As- 
siniboines,  the  Arapahoes,  the  Kiowas,  the  Co- 
manches,  and  the  Apaches.  These  were  the  lead- 
ers of  many  other  tribes  in  savage  campaigns 
which  set  the  land  aflame  from  the  Rio  Grande  to 
our  northern  line.  The  Sioux  and  Cheyennes  were 
more  especially  the  leaders,  and  they  always  did 
what  they  could  to  enlist  the  aid  of  the  less  war- 
like tribes  such  as  the  Crows,  the  Snakes,  the 
Bannacks,  the  Utes  —  indeed  all  of  the  savage 
or  semi-civilized  tribes  which  had  hung  on  the 
flanks  of  the  traffic  of  the  westbound  trail. 

The  Sioux,  then  at  the  height  of  their  power,  were 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  121 

distinguished  by  many  warlike  qualities.  They 
fought  hard  and  were  quick  to  seize  upon  any 
signs  of  weakness  in  their  enemies.  When  we,  in 
the  course  of  our  Civil  War,  had  withdrawn  some 
of  the  upper  posts,  the  Sioux  edged  in  at  once 
and  pressed  back  the  whites  quite  to  the  eastern 
confines  of  the  Plains.  WTien  we  were  locked 
in  the  death  grip  of  internecine  war  in  1862,  they 
rose  in  one  savage  wave  of  rebellion  of  their  own 
and  massacred  with  the  most  horrible  ferocity 
not  less  than  six  hundred  and  forty-four  whites 
in  Minnesota  and  South  Dakota.  When  Gen- 
eral Sibley  went  out  among  them  on  his  later 
punitive  campaign  he  had  his  hands  full  for 
many  a  long  and  weary  day. 

Events  following  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  did 
not  mend  matters  in  the  Indian  situation.  The 
railroads  had  large  land  grants  given  to  them 
along  their  lines,  and  they  began  to  offer  these 
lands  for  sale  to  settlers.  Soldier  scrip  entitling 
the  holder  to  locate  on  public  lands  now  began 
to  float  about.  Some  of  the  engineers,  even  some 
of  the  laborers,  upon  the  railroads,  seeing  how 
really  feasible  was  the  settlement  of  these  Plains, 
began  to  edge  out  and  to  set  up  their  homes, 
usually  not  far  from  the  railway  lines.  All  this 


122     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

increase  in  the  numbers  of  the  white  population 
not  only  infuriated  the  Indians  the  more,  but 
gave  them  the  better  chance  to  inflict  damage 
upon  our  people.  Our  Army  therefore  became 
very  little  more  than  a  vast  body  of  police,  and 
it  was  always  afoot  with  the  purpose  of  punish- 
ing these  offending  tribesmen,  who  knew  nothing 
of  the  higher  laws  of  war  and  who  committed 
atrocities  that  have  never  been  equalled  in  his- 
tory; unless  it  be  by  one  of  the  belligerents  of 
the  Great  War  in  Europe,  with  whom  we  are  at 
this  writing  engaged  —  once  more  in  the  inter- 
est of  a  sane  and  human  civilization.  The  last 
great  struggle  for  the  occupation  of  the  frontier 
was  on.  It  involved  the  ownership  of  the  last 
of  our  open  lands;  and  hence  may  be  called  the 
war  of  our  last  frontier. 

The  settler  who  pushed  West  continued  to  be 
the  man  who  shared  his  time  between  his  rifle 
and  his  plough.  The  numerous  buffalo  were 
butchered  with  an  endless  avidity  by  the  men 
who  now  appeared  upon  the  range.  As  the  great 
herds  regularly  migrated  southward  with  each 
winter's  snows,  they  were  met  by  the  settlers 
along  the  lower  railway  lines  and  in  a  brutal 
commerce  were  killed  in  thousands  and  in  miV- 


THE  INDIAN  WARS 

lions.  The  Indians  saw  this  sudden  and  appal- 
ling shrinkage  of  their  means  of  livelihood.  It 
meant  death  to  them.  To  their  minds,  especially 
when  they  thought  we  feared  them,  there  was 
but  one  answer  to  all  this  —  the  whites  must  all 
be  killed. 

Red  Cloud,  Crazy  Horse,  Roman  Nose,  Ameri- 
can Horse,  Black  Kettle  —  these  were  names  of 
great  Indian  generals  who  proved  their  ability 
to  fight.  At  times  they  brought  into  the  open 
country,  which  as  yet  remained  unoccupied  by 
the  great  pastoral  movement  from  the  south,  as 
many  as  five  thousand  mounted  warriors  in  one 
body,  and  they  were  well  armed  and  well  supplied 
with  ammunition.  Those  were  the  days  when 
the  Indian  agents  were  carrying  on  their  lists  twice 
as  many  Indians  as  actually  existed  —  and  re- 
ceiving twice  as  many  supplies  as  really  were  is- 
sued to  the  tribes.  The  curse  of  politics  was  ours 
even  at  that  time,  and  it  cost  us  then,  as  now, 
unestimated  millions  of  our  nation's  dearest  treas- 
ures. As  to  the  reservations  which  the  Indians 
were  urged  to  occupy,  they  left  them  when  they 
liked.  In  the  end,  when  they  were  beaten,  all 
they  were  asked  to  do  was  to  return  to  these 
reservations  and  be  fed. 


124      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

There  were  fought  in  the  West  from  1869  to 
1875  more  than  two  hundred  pitched  actions 
between  the  Army  and  the  Indians.  In  most 
cases  the  white  men  were  heavily  outnumbered. 
The  account  which  the  Army  gave  of  itself  on 
scores  of  unremembered  minor  fields  —  which 
meant  life  or  death  to  all  engaged  —  would  make 
one  of  the  best  pages  of  our  history,  could  it  be 
written  today.  The  enlisted  men  of  the  fron- 
tier Army  were  riding  and  shooting  men,  able 
to  live  as  the  Indians  did  and  able  to  beat  them 
at  their  own  game.  They  were  led  by  Army  offi- 
cers whose  type  has  never  been  improved  upon  in 
any  later  stage  of  our  Army  itself,  or  of  any  army 
in  the  world. 

There  are  certain  great  battles  which  may 
at  least  receive  notice,  although  it  would  be 
impossible  to  mention  more  than  a  few  of  the 
encounters  of  the  great  Indian  wars  on  the 
buffalo-range  at  about  the  time  of  the  buffalo's 
disappearance.  The  Fetterman  Massacre  in  1866, 
near  Fort  Phil  Kearney,  a  post  located  at  the  edge 
of  the  Big  Horn  Mountains,  was  a  blow  which 
the  Army  never  has  forgotten.  "In  a  place  of 
fifty  feet  square  lay  the  bodies  of  Colonel  Fetter- 
man, Captain  Brown,  and  sixty-five  enlisted  men. 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  125 

Each  man  was  stripped  naked  and  hacked  and 
scalped,  the  skulls  beaten  in  with  war  clubs 
and  the  bodies  gashed  with'  knives  almost  be- 
yond recognition,  with  other  ghastly  mutilations 
that  the  civilized  pen  hesitates  to  record." 

This  tragedy  brought  the  Indian  problem  be- 
fore the  country  as  never  before.  The  hand  of 
the  Western  rancher  and  trader  was  implacably 
against  the  tribesmen  of  the  plains;  the  city- 
dweller  of  the  East,  with  hazy  notions  of  the 
Indian  character,  was  disposed  to  urge  lenient 
methods  upon  those  responsible  for  govern- 
mental policy.  While  the  Sioux  and  Cheyenne 
wars  dragged  on,  Congress  created,  by  act  of 
July  20,  1867,  a  peace  commission  of  four  civi- 
lians and  three  army  officers  to  deal  with  the 
hostile  tribes.  For  more  than  a  year,  with  scant 
sympathy  from  the  military  members,  this  com- 
mission endeavored  to  remove  the  causes  of  fric- 
tion by  amicable  conference  with  the  Indian 
chiefs.  The  attitude  of  the  Army  is  reflected 
in  a  letter  of  General  Sherman  to  his  brother. 
"We  have  now  selected  and  provided  reservations 
for  all,  off  the  great  roads.  All  who  cling  to  their 
old  hunting-grounds  are  hostile  and  will  remain  so 
till  killed  off.  We  will  have  a  sort  of  predatory 


126     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

war  for  years — every  now  and  then  be  shocked 
by  the  indiscriminate  murder  of  travelers  and 
settlers,  but  the  country  is  so  large,  and  the  ad- 
vantage of  the  Indians  so  great,  that  we  cannot 
make  a  single  war  and  end  it.  From  the  nature 
of  things  we  must  take  chances  and  clean  out 
Indians  as  we  encounter  them." 

Segregation  of  the  Indian  tribes  upon  reserva- 
tions seemed  to  the  commission  the  only  solution 
of  the  vexing  problem.  Various  treaties  were 
made  and  others  were  projected  looking  toward 
the  removal  of  the  tribesmen  from  the  highways 
of  continental  travel.  The  result  was  misgiving 
and  increased  unrest  among  the  Indians. 

In  midsummer  of  1868  forays  occurred  at  many 
points  along  the  border  of  the  Indian  Territory. 
General  Sheridan,  who  now  commanded  the  De- 
partment of  the  Missouri,  believed  that  a  general 
war  was  imminent.  He  determined  to  teach  the 
southern  tribesmen  a  lesson  they  would  not  for- 
get. In  the  dead  of  winter  our  troops  marched 
against  the  Cheyennes,  then  in  their  encamp- 
ments below  the  Kansas  line.  The  Indians  did 
not  believe  that  white  men  could  march  in 
weather  forty  below  zero,  during  which  they 
themselves  sat  in  their  tepees  around  their  fires; 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  127 

but  our  cavalrymen  did  march  in  such  weather, 
and  under  conditions  such  as  our  cavalry  perhaps 
could  not  endure  today.  Among  these  troops  was 
the  Seventh  Cavalry,  Ouster's  Regiment,  formed 
after  the  Civil  War,  and  it  was  led  by  Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel George  A.  Custer  himself,  that  gallant 
officer  whose  name  was  to  go  into  further  and  more 
melancholy  history  of  the  Plains. 

Custer  marched  until  he  got  in  touch  with  the 
trails  of  the  Cheyennes,  whom  he  knew  to  belong 
to  Black  Kettle's  band.  He  did  not  at  the  time 
know  that  below  them,  in  the  same  valley  of  the 
Washita,  were  also  the  winter  encampments  of 
the  Kiowas,  the  Comanches,  the  Arapahoes,  and 
even  a  few  Apaches.  He  attacked  at  dawn  of  a 
bleak  winter  morning,  November  27,  1868,  after 
taking  the  precaution  of  surrounding  the  camp, 
and  killed  Black  Kettle,  and  another  chief,  Little 
Rock,  and  over  a  hundred  of  their  warriors. 
Many  women  and  children  also  were  killed  in 
this  attack.  The  result  was  one  which  sank  deep 
into  the  Indian  mind.  They  began  to  respect  the 
men  who  could  outmarch  them  and  outlive  them 
on  the  range.  Surely,  they  thought,  these  were 
not  the  same  men  who  had  abandoned  Forts 
Phil  Kearney,  C.  F.  Smith,  and  Reno.  There 


128     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

had  been  some  mistake  about  this  matter.  The 
Indians  began  to  think  it  over.  The  result  was 
a  pacifying  of  all  the  country  south  of  the  Platte. 
The  lower  Indians  began  to  come  in  and  give  them- 
selves up  to  the  reservation  life. 

One  of  the  hardest  of  pitched  battles  ever  fought 
with  an  Indian  tribe  occurred  in  September,  1868, 
on  the  Arickaree  or  South  Fork  of  the  Republican 
River,  where  General  "Sandy"  Forsyth,  and  his 
scouts,  for  nine  days  fought  over  six  hundred 
Cheyennes  and  Arapahoes.  These  savages  had 
been  committing  atrocities  upon  the  settlers  of  the 
Saline,  the  Solomon,  and  the  Republican  valleys, 
and  were  known  to  have  killed  some  sixty-four 
men  and  women  at  the  time  General  Sheridan 
resolved  to  punish  them.  Forsyth  had  no  chance 
to  get  a  command  of  troops,  but  he  was  allowed 
to  enlist  fifty  scouts,  all  "first-class,  hardened 
frontiersmen/'  and  with  this  body  of  fighting 
men  he  carried  out  the  most  dramatic  battle 
perhaps  ever  waged  on  the  Plains. 

Forsyth  ran  into  the  trail  of  two  or  three  large 
Indian  villages,  but  none  the  less  he  followed  on 
until  he  came  to  the  valley  of  the  South  Fork. 
Here  the  Cheyennes  under  the  redoubtable  Roman 
Nose  surrounded  him  on  the  17th  of  September. 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  129 

The  small  band  of  scouts  took  refuge  on  a  brushy 
island  some  sixty  yards  from  shore,  and  hastily 
dug  themselves  in  under  fire.. 

They  stood  at  bay  outnumbered  ten  to  one, 
with  small  prospect  of  escape,  for  the  little  island 
offered  no  protection  of  itself,  and  was  in  point- 
blank  range  from  the  banks  of  the  river.  All 
their  horses  soon  were  shot  down,  and  the  men 
lay  in  the  rifle  pits  with  no  hope  of  escape. 
Roman  Nose,  enraged  at  the  resistance  put 
up  by  Forsyth's  men,  led  a  band  of  some  four 
hundred  of  his  warriors  in  the  most  desperate 
charge  that  has  been  recorded  in  all  our  Indian 
fighting  annals.  It  was  rarely  that  the  Indian 
would  charge  at  all;  but  these  tribesmen,  stripped 
naked  for  the  encounter,  and  led  at  first  by  that 
giant  warrior,  who  came  on  shouting  his  defiance, 
charged  in  full  view  not  only  once  but  three 
times  in  one  day,  and  got  within  a  hundred  feet 
of  the  foot  of  the  island  where  the  scouts  were 
lying. 

According  to  Forsyth's  report,  the  Indians 
came  on  in  regular  ranks  like  the  cavalry  of 
the  white  men,  more  than  four  hundred  strong. 
They  were  met  by  the  fire  of  repeating  car- 
bines and  revolvers,  and  they  stood  for  the  first, 


130     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

second,  third,  fourth,  and  fifth  fire  of  repeating 
weapons,  and  still  charged  in!  Roman  Nose 
was  killed  at  last  within  touch  of  the  rifle  pits 
against  which  he  was  leading  his  men.  The  sec- 
ond charge  was  less  desperate,  for  the  savages 
lost  heart  after  the  loss  of  their  leader.  The 
third  one,  delivered  towards  the  evening  of  that 
same  day,  was  desultory.  By  that  time  the 
bed  of  the  shallow  stream  was  well  filled  with 
fallen  horses  and  dead  warriors. 

Forsyth  ordered  meat  cut  from  the  bodies  of  his 
dead  horses  and  buried  in  the  wet  sand  so  that  it 
might  keep  as  long  as  possible.  Lieutenant  Bee- 
cher,  his  chief  of  scouts,  was  killed,  as  also  were 
Surgeon  Mooers,  and  Scouts  Smith,  Chalmers, 
Wilson,  Farley,  and  Day.  Seventeen  others  of 
the  party  were  wounded,  some  severely.  Forsyth 
himself  was  shot  three  times,  once  in  the  head. 
His  left  leg  was  broken  below  the  knee,  and  his 
right  thigh  was  ripped  up  by  a  rifle  ball,  which 
caused  him  extreme  pain.  Later  he  cut  the 
bullet  out  of  his  own  leg,  and  was  relieved  from 
some  part  of  the  pain.  After  his  rescue,  when 
his  broken  leg  was  set  it  did  not  suit  him,  and 
he  had  the  leg  broken  twice  in  the  hospital  and 
reset  until  it  knitted  properly. 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  131 

Forsyth's  men  lay  under  fire  under  a  blazing 
sun  in  their  holes  on  the  sandbar  for  nine  days. 
But  the  savages  never  dislodged  them,  and  at 
last  they  made  off,  their  women  and  children 
beating  the  death  drums,  and  the  entire  village 
mourning  the  unreturning  brave.  On  the  second 
day  of  the  fighting  Forsyth  had  got  out  mes- 
sengers at  extreme  risk,  and  at  length  the  party 
was  rescued  by  a  detachment  of  the  Tenth  Cav- 
alry. The  Indians  later  said  that  they  had 
in  all  over  six  hundred  warriors  in  this  fight. 
Their  losses,  though  variously  estimated,  were 
undoubtedly  heavy. 

It  was  encounters  such  as  this  which  gradually 
were  teaching  the  Indians  that  they  could  not  beat 
the  white  men,  so  that  after  a  time  they  began  to 
yield  to  the  inevitable. 

What  is  known  as  the  Baker  Massacre  was  the 
turning-point  in  the  half-century  of  warfare  with 
the  Blackfeet,  the  savage  tribe  which  had  preyed 
upon  the  men  of  the  fur  trade  in  a  long-continued 
series  of  robberies  and  murders.  On  January 
22,  1870,  Major  E.  M.  Baker,  led  by  half-breeds 
who  knew  the  country,  surprised  the  Piegans  in 
their  winter  camp  on  the  Marias  River,  just  below 
the  border.  He,  like  Custer,  attacked  at  dawn, 


132     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

opening  the  encounter  with  a  general  fire  into  the 
tepees.  He  killed  a  hundred  and  seventy-three 
of  the  Piegans,  including  very  many  women  and 
children,  as  was  unhappily  the  case  so  often  in 
these  surprise  attacks.  It  was  deplorable  warfare. 
But  it  ended  the  resistance  of  the  savage  Black- 
feet.  They  have  been  disposed  for  peace  from 
that  day  to  this. 

The  terrible  revenge  which  the  Sioux  and 
Cheyennes  took  in  the  battle  which  annihilated 
Custer  and  his  men  on  the  Little  Big  Horn  in 
the  summer  of  1876;  the  Homeric  running  fight 
made  by  Chief  Joseph  of  the  Nez  Perces  —  a  flight 
which  baffled  our  best  generals  and  their  men  for 
a  hundred  and  ten  days  over  more  than  fourteen 
hundred  miles  of  wilderness  —  these  are  events  so 
well  known  that  it  seems  needless  to  do  more  than 
to  refer  to  them.  The  Nez  Perces  in  turn  went 
down  forever  when  Joseph  came  out  and  surren- 
dered, saying,  "From  where  the  sun  now  stands 
I  fight  against  the  white  man  no  more  forever." 
His  surrender  to  fate  did  not  lack  its  dignity.  In- 
deed, a  mournful  interest  attached  to  the  inevit- 
able destiny  of  all  these  savage  leaders,  who,  no 
doubt,  according  to  their  standards,  were  doing 
what  men  should  do  and  all  that  men  could  do. 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  133 

The  main  difficulty  in  administering  full  pun- 
ishment to  such  bands  was  that  after  a  defeat 
they  scattered,  so  that  they  could  not  be  over- 
taken in  any  detailed  fashion.  After  the  Custer 
fight  many  of  the  tribe  went  north  of  the  Cana- 
dian line  and  remained  there  for  some  time. 
The  writer  himself  has  seen  along  the  Qu'Ap- 
pelle  River  in  Saskatchewan  some  of  the  wheels 
taken  out  of  the  watches  of  Custer 's  men.  The 
savages  broke  them  up  and  used  the  wheels  for 
jewelry.  They  even  offered  the  Canadians  for 
trade  boots,  hats,  and  clothing  taken  from  the 
bodies  of  Custer's  men. 

The  Modoc  war  against  the  warriors  of  Cap- 
tain Jack  in  1873  was  waged  in  the  lava  beds 
of  Oregon,  and  it  had  the  distinction  of  being 
one  of  the  first  Indian  wars  to  be  well  reported 
in  the  newspapers.  We  heard  a  great  deal  of  the 
long  and  trying  campaigns  waged  by  the  Army  in 
revenge  for  the  murder  of  General  Canby  in  his 
council  tent.  We  got  small  glory  out  of  that  war, 
perhaps,  but  at  last  we  hanged  the  ringleader  of 
the  murderers;  and  the  extreme  Northwest  re- 
mained free  from  that  time  on. 

Far  in  the  dry  Southwest,  where  home-building 
man  did  not  as  yet  essay  a  general  occupation  of 


134      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

the  soil,  the  blood-thirsty  Apache  long  waged  a 
warfare  which  tried  the  mettle  of  our  Army  as 
perhaps  no  other  tribes  ever  have  done.  The 
Spaniards  had  fought  these  Apaches  for  nearly 
three  hundred  years,  and  had  not  beaten  them. 
They  offered  three  hundred  dollars  each  for 
Apache  scalps,  and  took  a  certain  number  of 
them.  But  they  left  all  the  remaining  braves 
sworn  to  an  eternal  enmity.  The  Apaches  be- 
came mountain  outlaws,  whose  blood-mad  thirst 
for  revenge  never  died.  No  tribe  ever  fought 
more  bitterly.  Hemmed  in  and  surrounded,  with 
no  hope  of  escape,  in  some  instances  they  per- 
ished literally  to  the  last  man.  General  George 
Crook  finished  the  work  of  cleaning  up  the 
Apache  outlaws  only  by  use  of  the  trailers  of 
their  own  people  who  sided  with  the  whites  for 
pay.  Without  the  Pima  scouts  he  never  could 
have  run  down  the  Apaches  as  he  did.  Perhaps 
these  were  the  hardest  of  all  the  Plains  Indians 
to  find  and  to  fight.  But  in  1872  Crook  subdued 
them  and  concentrated  them  in  reservations  in 
Arizona.  Ten  years  later,  under  Geronimo,  a 
tribe  of  the  Apaches  broke  loose  and  yielded  to 
General  Crook  only  after  a  prolonged  war.  Once 
again  they  raided  New  Mexico  and  Arizona  in 


THE  INDIAN  WARS  135 

1885-6.  This  was  the  last  raid  of  Geronimo.  He 
was  forced  by  General  Miles  to  surrender  and, 
together  with  his  chief  warriors,,  was  deported  to 
Fort  Pickens  in  Florida. 

In  all  these  savage  pitched  battles  and  bloody 
skirmishes,  the  surprises  and  murderous  assaults 
all  over  the  old  range,  there  were  hundreds  of 
settlers  killed,  hundreds  also  of  our  army  men, 
including  some  splendid  officers.  In  the  Custer 
fight  alone,  on  the  Little  Big  Horn,  the  Army  lost 
Custer  himself,  thirteen  commissioned  officers, 
and  two  hundred  and  fifty-six  enlisted  men  killed, 
with  two  officers  and  fifty-one  men  wounded;  a 
total  of  three  hundred  and  twenty-three  killed 
and  wounded  in  one  battle.  Custer  had  in  his 
full  column  about  seven  hundred  men.  The  num- 
ber of  the  Indians  has  been  variously  estimated. 
They  had  perhaps  five  thousand  men  in  their 
villages  when  they  met  Custer  in  this,  the  most 
historic  and  most  ghastly  battle  of  the  Plains. 
It  would  be  bootless  to  revive  any  of  the  old  dis- 
cussions regarding  Custer  and  his  rash  courage. 
Whether  in  error  or  in  wisdom,  he  died,  and  gal- 
lantly. He  and  his  men  helped  clear  the  frontier 
for  those  who  were  to  follow,  and  the  task  took 
its  toll. 


136      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

Thus,  slowly  but  steadily,  even  though  handi- 
capped by  a  vacillating  governmental  policy  re- 
garding the  Indians,  we  muddled  through  these 
great  Indian  wars  of  the  frontier,  our  soldiers 
doing  their  work  splendidly  and  uncomplainingly, 
such  work  as  no  other  body  of  civilized  troops 
has  ever  been  asked  to  do  or  could  have  done  if 
asked.  At  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  we  our- 
selves were  a  nation  of  fighting  men.  We  were 
fit  and  we  were  prepared.  The  average  of  our 
warlike  qualities  never  has  been  so  high  as  then. 
The  frontier  produced  its  own  pathfinders,  its 
own  saviors,  its  own  fighting  men. 

So  now  the  frontier  lay  ready,  waiting  for  the 
man  with  the  plough.  The  dawn  of  that  last  day 
was  at  hand. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE   CATTLE   KINGS 

IT  is  proper  now  to  look  back  yet  again  over  the 
scenes  with  which  we  hitherto  have  had  to  do. 
It  is  after  the  railways  have  come  to  the  Plains. 
The  Indians  now  are  vanishing.  The  buffalo  have 
not  yet  gone,  but  are  soon  to  pass. 

Until  the  closing  days  of  the  Civil  War  the  north- 
ern range  was  a  wide,  open  domain,  the  greatest 
ever  offered  for  the  use  of  a  people.  None  claimed 
it  then  in  fee;  none  wanted  it  in  fee.  The  grasses 
and  the  sweet  waters  offered  accessible  and  pro- 
fitable chemistry  for  all  men  who  had  cows  to 
range.  The  land  laws  still  were  vague  and  in- 
exact in  application,  and  each  man  could  construe 
them  much  as  he  liked.  The  excellent  homestead 
law  of  1862,  one  of  the  few  really  good  land  laws 
that  have  been  put  on  our  national  statute  books, 
worked  well  enough  so  long  as  we  had  good  farm- 
ing lands  for  homesteading  —  lands  of  which  a 

137 


138      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

quarter  section  would  support  a  home  and  a 
family.  This  same  homestead  law  was  the  only 
one  available  for  use  on  the  cattle-range.  In 
practice  it  was  violated  thousands  of  times  —  in 
fact,  of  necessity  violated  by  any  cattle  man  who 
wished  to  acquire  sufficient  range  to  run  a  con- 
siderable herd.  Our  great  timber  kings,  our  great 
cattle  kings,  made  their  fortunes  out  of  their 
open  contempt  for  the  homestead  law,  which  was 
designed  to  give  all  the  people  an  even  chance  for 
a  home  and  a  farm.  It  made,  and  lost,  America. 

Swiftly  enough,  here  and  there  along  all  the 
great  waterways  of  the  northern  range,  ranchers 
and  their  men  filed  claims  on  the  water  fronts. 
The  dry  land  thus  lay  tributary  to  them.  For 
the  most  part  the  open  lands  were  held  practi- 
cally under  squatter  right;  the  first  cowman  in 
any  valley  usually  had  his  rights  respected,  at 
least  for  a  time.  These  were  the  days  of  the  open 
range.  Fences  had  not  come,  nor  had  farms  been 
staked  out. 

From  the  South  now  appeared  that  tremendous 
and  elemental  force  —  most  revolutionary  of  all 
the  great  changes  we  have  noted  in  the  swiftly 
changing  West  —  the  bringing  in  of  thousands  of 
horned  kine  along  the  northbound  trails.  The 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  139 

trails  were  hurrying  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  the 
upper  plains  of  Texas  and  northward,  along  the 
north  and  south  line  of  the  Frontier  —  that  land 
which  now  we  have  been  seeking  less  to  define 
and  to  mark  precisely  than  fundamentally  to 
understand. 

The  Indian  wars  had  much  to  do  with  the 
cow  trade.  The  Indians  were  crowded  upon  the 
reservations,  and  they  had  to  be  fed,  and  fed  on 
beef.  Corrupt  Indian  agents  made  fortunes,  and 
the  Beef  Ring  at  Washington,  one  of  the  most 
despicable  lobbies  which  ever  fattened  there, 
now  wrote  its  brief  and  unworthy  history.  In  a 
strange  way  corrupt  politics  and  corrupt  business 
affected  the  phases  of  the  cattle  industry  as  they 
had  affected  our  relations  with  the  Indians.  More 
than  once  a  herd  of  some  thousand  beeves  driven 
up  from  Texas  on  contract,  and  arriving  late  in 
autumn,  was  not  accepted  on  its  arrival  at  the 
army  post — some  pet  of  Washington  perhaps  had 
his  own  herd  to  sell!  All  that  could  be  done  then 
would  be  to  seek  out  a  "  holding  range."  In  this 
way,  more  and  more,  the  capacity  of  the  northern 
Plains  to  nourish  and  improve  cattle  became  es- 
tablished. 

Naturally,   the  price   of  cows  began   to   rise; 


140      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

and  naturally,  also,  the  demand  for  open  range 
steadily  increased.  There  now  began  the  whole 
complex  story  of  leased  lands  and  fenced  lands. 
The  frontier  still  was  offering  opportunity  for 
the  bold  man  to  reap  where  he  had  not  sown. 
Lands  leased  to  the  Indians  of  the  civilized  tribes 
began  to  cut  large  figure  in  the  cow  trade  —  as 
well  as  some  figure  in  politics  —  until  at  length 
the  thorny  situation  was  handled  by  a  firm  hand 
at  Washington.  The  methods  of  the  East  were 
swiftly  overrunning  those  of  the  West.  Politics 
and  graft  and  pull,  things  hitherto  unknown,  soon 
wrote  their  hurrying  story  also  over  all  this  newly 
won  region  from  which  the  rifle-smoke  had  scarcely 
yet  cleared  away. 

But  every  herd  which  passed  north  for  delivery 
of  one  sort  or  the  other  advanced  the  education  of 
the  cowman,  whether  of  the  northern  or  the  south- 
ern ranges.  Some  of  the  southern  men  began  to 
start  feeding  ranges  in  the  North,  retaining  their 
breeding  ranges  in  the  South.  The  demand  of 
the  great  upper  range  for  cattle  seemed  for  the 
time  insatiable. 

To  the  vision  of  the  railroad  builders  a  tre- 
mendous potential  freightage  now  appeared.  The 
railroad  builders  began  to  calculate  that  one  day 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  141 

they  would  parallel  the  northbound  cow  trail  with 
iron  trails  of  their  own  and  compete  with  nature 
for  the  carrying  of  this  beef.  The  whole  swift 
story  of  all  that  development,  while  the  west- 
bound rails  were  crossing  and  criss-crossing  the 
newly  won  frontier,  scarce  lasted  twenty  years. 
Presently  we  began  to  hear  in  the  East  of  the 
Chisholm  Trail  and  of  the  Western  Trail  which 
lay  beyond  it,  and  of  many  smaller  and  inter- 
mingling branches.  We  heard  of  Ogallalla,  in 
Nebraska,  the  "Gomorrah  of  the  Range,"  the 
first  great  upper  market-place  for  distribution  of 
cattle  to  the  swiftly  forming  northern  ranches. 
The  names  of  new  rivers  came  upon  our  maps; 
and  beyond  the  first  railroads  we  began  to  hear 
of  the  Yellowstone,  the  Powder,  the  Musselshell, 
the  Tongue,  the  Big  Horn,  the  Little  Missouri. 

The  wild  life,  bold  and  carefree,  coming  up  from 
the  South  now  in  a  mighty  surging  wave,  spread 
all  over  that  new  West  which  offered  to  the 
people  of  older  lands  a  strange  and  fascinating 
interest.  Every  one  on  the  range  had  money; 
every  one  was  independent.  Once  more  it  seemed 
that  man  had  been  able  to  overleap  the  confin- 
ing limitations  of  his  life,  and  to  attain  inde- 
pendence, self-indulgence,  ease  and  liberty.  A 


142     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

chorus  of  Homeric,  riotous  mirth,  as  of  a  land  in 
laughter,  rose  up  all  over  the  great  range.  After 
all,  it  seemed  that  we  had  a  new  world  left,  a 
land  not  yet  used.  We  still  were  young!  The 
cry  arose  that  there  was  land  enough  for  all  out 
West.  And  at  first  the  trains  of  white-topped 
wagons  rivaled  the  crowded  coaches  westbound 
on  the  rails. 

In  consequence  there  came  an  entire  readjust- 
ment of  values.  This  country,  but  yesterday 
barren  and  worthless,  now  was  covered  with 
gold,  deeper  than  the  gold  of  California  or  any  of 
the  old  placers.  New  securities  and  new  values 
appeared.  Banks  did  not  care  much  for  the 
land  as  security  —  it  was  practically  worthless 
without  the  cattle  —  but  they  would  lend  money 
on  cattle  at  rates  which  did  not  then  seem  usu- 
rious. A  new  system  of  finance  came  into  use. 
Side  by  side  with  the  expansion  of  credits  went 
the  expansion  of  the  cattle  business.  Literally 
in  hundreds  of  thousands  the  cows  came  north 
from  the  exhaustless  ranges  of  the  lower  country. 

It  was  a  wild,  strange  day.  But  withal  it  was 
the  kindliest  and  most  generous  time,  alike  the 
most  contented  and  the  boldest  time,  in  all 
the  history  of  our  frontiers.  There  never  was  a 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  143 

better  life  than  that  of  the  cowman  who  had  a 
good  range  on  the  Plains  and  cattle  enough  to 
stock  his  range.  There  never  will  be  found  a 
better  man's  country  in  all  the  world  than  that 
which  ran  from  the  Missouri  up  to  the  low  foot- 
hills of  the  Rockies. 

The  lower  cities  took  their  tribute  of  the 
northbound  cattle  for  quite  a  time.  Wichita, 
Coffeyville,  and  other  towns  of  lower  Kansas  in 
turn  made  bids  for  prominence  as  cattle  marts. 
Agents  of  the  Chicago  stockyards  would  come 
down  along  the  trails  into  the  Indian  Nations  to 
meet  the  northbound  herds  and  to  try  to  divert 
them  to  this  or  that  market  as  a  shipping-point. 
The  Kiowas  and  Comanches,  not  yet  wholly  con- 
fined to  their  reservations,  sometimes  took  trib- 
ute, whether  in  theft  or  in  open  extortion,  of  the 
herds  laboring  upward  through  the  long  slow 
season.  Trail-cutters  and  herd-combers,  licensed 
or  unlicensed  hangers-on  to  the  northbound 
throngs  of  cattle,  appeared  along  the  lower  trails 
—  with  some  reason,  occasionally;  for  in  a  great 
northbound  herd  there  might  be  many  cows 
included  under  brands  other  than  those  of  the 
road  brands  registered  for  the  drovers  of  that 
particular  herd.  Cattle  thieving  became  an  in- 


144     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

dustry  of  certain  value,  rivaling  in  some  localities 
the  operations  of  the  bandits  of  the  placer  camps. 
There  was  great  wealth  suddenly  to  be  seen. 
The  weak  and  the  lawless,  as  well  as  the  strong 
and  the  unscrupulous,  set  out  to  reap  after  their 
own  fashion  where  they  had  not  sown.  If  a 
grave  here  or  there  appeared  along  the  trail  or 
at  the  edge  of  the  straggling  town,  it  mattered 
little.  If  the  gamblers  and  the  desperadoes  of 
the  cow  towns  such  as  Newton,  Ellsworth,  Abi- 
lene, Dodge,  furnished  a  man  for  breakfast  day 
after  day,  it  mattered  little,  for  plenty  of  men 
remained,  as  good  or  better.  The  life  was  large 
and  careless,  and  bloodshed  was  but  an  incident. 
During  the  early  and  unregulated  days  of  the 
cattle  industry,  the  frontier  insisted  on  its  own 
creed,  its  own  standards.  But  all  the  time, 
coming  out  from  the  East,  were  scores  and  hun- 
dreds of  men  of  exacter  notions  of  trade  and 
business.  The  enormous  waste  of  the  cattle 
range  could  not  long  endure.  The  toll  taken  by 
the  thievery  of  the  men  who  came  to  be  called 
range-rustlers  made  an  element  of  loss  which  could 
not  long  be  sustained  by  thinking  men.  As  the 
Vigilantes  regulated  things  in  the  mining  camps, 
so  now  in  slightly  different  fashion  the  new 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  145 

property  owners  on  the  upper  range  established 
their  own  ideas,  their  own  sense  of  proportion  as 
to  law  and  order.  The  cattle  associations,  the 
banding  together  of  many  owners  of  vast  herds, 
for  mutual  protection  and  mutual  gain  were  a 
natural  and  logical  development.  Outside  of  these 
there  was  for  a  time  a  highly  efficient  corps  of 
cattle-range  Vigilantes,  who  shot  and  hanged 
some  scores  of  rustlers. 

It  was  a  frenzied  life  while  it  lasted  —  this  lurid 
outburst,  the  last  flare  of  the  frontier.  Such 
towns  as  Dodge  and  Ogallalla  offered  extraordi- 
nary phenomena  of  unrestraint.  But  fortunately 
into  the  worst  of  these  capitals  of  license  came 
the  best  men  of  the  new  regime,  and  the  new 
officers  of  the  law,  the  agents  of  the  Vigilantes, 
the  advance-guard  of  civilization  now  crowding 
on  the  heels  of  the  wild  men  of  the  West.  In 
time  the  lights  of  the  dance-halls  and  the  saloons 
and  the  gambling  parlors  went  out  one  by  one 
all  along  the  frontier.  By  1885  Dodge  City,  a 
famed  capital  of  the  cow  trade,  which  will  live 
as  long  as  the  history  of  that  industry  is  known, 
resigned  its  eminence  and  declared  that  from 
where  the  sun  then  stood  it  would  be  a  cow 
camp  no  more!  The  men  of  Dodge  knew  that 


146      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

another  day  had  dawned.  But  this  was  after 
the  homesteaders  had  arrived  and  put  up  their 
wire  fences,  cutting  off  from  the  town  the  hold- 
ing grounds  of  the  northbound  herds. 

This  innovation  of  barb-wire  fences  in  the  sev- 

/ 

enties  had  caused  a  tremendous  alteration  of  con- 
ditions over  all  the  country.  It  had  enabled  men 
to  fence  in  their  own  water-fronts,  their  own  home- 
steads. Casually,  and  at  first  without  any  ob- 
jection filed  by  any  one,  they  had  included  in 
their  fences  many  hundreds  of  thousands  of  acres 
of  range  land  to  which  they  had  no  title  what- 
ever. These  men  —  like  the  large-handed  cow 
barons  of  the  Indian  Nations,  who  had  things 
much  as  they  willed  in  a  little  unnoted  realm  all 
their  own  —  had  money  and  political  influence. 
And  there  seemed  still  range  enough  for  all.  If 
a  man  wished  to  throw  a  drift  fence  here  or 
there,  what  mattered  it? 

Up  to  this  time  not  much  attention  had  been 
paid  to  the  Little  Fellow,  the  man  of  small  capital 
who  registered  a  brand  of  his  own,  and  who  — 
with  a  Maverick1  here  and  there  and  the  natural 

1  In  the  early  days  a  rancher  by  the  name  of  Maverick,  a  Texas 
man,  had  made  himself  rich  simply  by  riding  out  on  the  open  range 
and  branding  loose  and  unmarked  occupants  of  the  free  lands.  Hence 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  147 

increase,  and  perhaps  a  trifle  of  unnatural  in- 
crease here  and  there  —  had  proved  able  to  ac- 
cumulate with  more  or  les's  rapidity  a  herd  of 
his  own.  Now  the  cattle  associations  passed 
rules  that  no  foreman  should  be  allowed  to  have 
or  register  a  brand  of  his  own.  Not  that  any 
foreman  could  be  suspected  —  not  at  all!  — 
but  the  foreman  who  insisted  on  his  old  right 
to  own  a  running  iron  and  a  registered  brand 
was  politely  asked  to  find  his  employment  some- 
where else. 

The  large-handed  and  once  generous  methods 
of  the  old  range  now  began  to  narrow  themselves. 
Even  if  the  Little  Fellow  were  able  to  throw  a 
fence  around  his  own  land,  very  often  he  did  not 
have  land  enough  to  support  his  herd  with  profit. 
A  certain  antipathy  now  began  to  arise  between 
the  great  cattle  owners  and  the  small  ones,  especi- 
ally on  the  upper  range,  where  some  rather  bitter 
wars  were  fought  —  the  cow  kings  accusing  their 
smaller  rivals  of  rustling  cows;  the  small  men 


the  term  "Maverick"  was  applied  to  any  unbranded  animal  running 
loose  on  the  range.  No  one  cared  to  interfere  with  these  early  activi- 
ties in  collecting  unclaimed  cattle.  Many  a  foundation  for  a  great 
fortune  was  laid  in  precisely  that  way.  It  was  not  until  the  more 
canny  days  in  the  North  that  Mavericks  were  regarded  with  jealous 
eyes. 


148      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

accusing  the  larger  operators  of  having  for  years 
done  the  same  thing,  and  of  having  grown  rich 
at  it. 

The  cattle  associations,  thrifty  and  shifty, 
sending  their  brand  inspectors  as  far  east  as 
the  stockyards  of  Kansas  City  and  Chicago, 
naturally  had  the  whip  hand  of  the  smaller 
men.  They  employed  detectives  who  regularly 
combed  out  the  country  in  search  of  men  who 
had  loose  ideas  of  mine  and  thine.  All  the  time 
the  cow  game  was  becoming  stricter  and  harder. 
Easterners  brought  on  the  East's  idea  of  prop- 
erty, of  low  interest,  sure  returns,  and  good 
security.  In  short,  there  was  set  on  once  more 
—  as  there  had  been  in  every  great  movement 
across  the  entire  West  —  the  old  contest  be- 
tween property  rights  and  human  independence 
in  action.  It  was  now  once  more  the  Frontier 
against  the  States,  and  the  States  were  fore- 
doomed to  win. 

The  barb-wire  fence,  which  was  at  first  used 
extensively  by  the  great  operators,  came  at  last 
to  be  the  greatest  friend  of  the  Little  Fellow 
on  the  range.  The  Little  Fellow,  who  under 
the  provisions  of  the  homestead  act  began  to 
push  West  and  to  depart  farther  and  farther 


THE  CATTLE  KINGS  149 

from  the  protecting  lines  of  the  railways,  could 
locate  land  and  water  for  himself  and  fence  in 
both.  "I've  got  the  law  back  of  me,"  was  what 
he  said;  and  what  he  said  was  true.  Around  the 
old  cow  camps  of  the  trails,  and  around  the  young 
settlements  which  did  not  aspire  to  be  called 
cow  camps,  the  homesteaders  fenced  in  land  —  so 
much  land  that  there  came  to  be  no  place  near 
any  of  the  shipping-points  where  a  big  herd  from 
the  South  could  be  held.  Along  the  southern 
range  artificial  barriers  to  the  long  drive  began 
to  be  raised.  It  would  be  hard  to  say  whether 
fear  of  Texas  competition  or  of  Texas  cattle  fever 
was  the  more  powerful  motive  in  the  minds  of 
ranchers  in  Colorado  and  Kansas.  But  the  cattle 
quarantine  laws  of  1885  nearly  broke  up  the  long 
drive  of  that  year.  Men  began  to  talk  of  fencing 
off  the  trails,  and  keeping  the  northbound  herds 
within  the  fences  —  a  thing  obviously  impossible. 
The  railroads  soon  rendered  this  discussion 
needless.  Their  agents  went  down  to  Texas  and 
convinced  the  shippers  that  it  would  be  cheaper 
and  safer  to  put  their  cows  on  cattle  trains  and 
ship  them  directly  to  the  ranges  where  they  were 
to  be  delivered.  And  in  time  the  rails  running 
north  and  south  across  the  Staked  Plains  into  the 


150     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

heart  of  the  lower  range  began  to  carry  most  of 
the  cattle.  So  ended  the  old  cattle  trails. 

What  date  shall  we  fix  for  the  setting  of  the  sun 
of  that  last  frontier?  Perhaps  the  year  1885  is  as 
accurate  as  any  —  the  time  when  the  cattle  trails 
practically  ceased  to  bring  north  their  vast  trib- 
ute. But,  in  fact,  there  is  no  exact  -date  for  the 
passing  of  the  frontier.  Its  decline  set  in  on 
what  day  the  first  lank  "nester"  from  the  States 
outspanned  his  sun-burned  team  as  he  pulled  up 
beside  some  sweet  water  on  the  rolling  lands, 
somewhere  in  the  West,  and  looked  about  him, 
and  looked  again  at  the  land  map  held  in  his 
hand. 

"  I  reckon  this  is  our  land,  Mother, "  said  he. 

When  he  said  that,  he  pronounced  the  doom 
of  the  old  frontier. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  HOMESTEADER 

His  name  was  usually  Nester  or  Little  Fellow. 
It  was  the  old  story  of  the  tortoise  and  the  hare, 
The  Little  Fellow  was  from  the  first  destined  to 
win.  His  steady  advance,  now  on  this  flank, 
now  on  that,  just  back  of  the  vanguard  pushing 
westward,  had  marked  the  end  of  all  our  earlier 
frontiers.  The  same  story  now  was  being  written 
on  the  frontier  of  the  Plains. 

But  in  the  passing  of  this  last  frontier  the  type 
of  the  land-seeking  man,  the  type  of  the  American, 
began  to  alter  distinctly.  The  million  dead  of  our 
cruel  Civil  War  left  a  great  gap  in  the  American 
population  which  otherwise  would  have  occupied 
the  West  and  Northwest  after  the  clearing  away 
of  the  Indians.  For  three  decades  we  had  been 
receiving  a  strong  and  valuable  immigration  from 
the  north  of  Europe.  It  was  in  great  part  this 
continuous  immigration  which  occupied  the  farm- 

151 


152      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

ing  lands  of  upper  Iowa,  Minnesota,  and  the  Da- 
kotas.  Thus  the  population  of  the  Northwest 
became  largely  foreign.  Each  German  or  Scan- 
dinavian who  found  himself  prospering  in  this 
rich  new  country  was  himself  an  immigration 
agency.  He  sent  back  word  to  his  friends  and 
relatives  in  the  Old  World  and  these  came  to 
swell  the  steadily  thickening  population  of  the 
New. 

We  have  seen  that  the  enterprising  cattlemen 
had  not  been  slow  to  reach  out  for  such  resources 
as  they  might.  Perhaps  at  one  time  between 
1885  and  1890  there  were  over  ten  million  acres 
of  land  illegally  fenced  in  on  the  upper  range 
by  large  cattle  companies.  This  had  been  done 
without  any  color  of  law  whatever;  a  man  simply 
threw  out  his  fences  as  far  as  he  liked,  and  took 
in  range  enough  to  pasture  all  the  cattle  that  he 
owned.  His  only  pretext  was  "I  saw  it -first." 
For  the  Nester  who  wanted  a  way  through  these 
fences  out  into  the  open  public  lands,  he  cher- 
ished a  bitter  resentment.  And  yet  the  Nester 
must  in  time  win  through,  must  eventually  find 
the  little  piece  of  land  which  he  was  seeking. 

The  government  at  Washington  was  finally 
obliged  to  take  action.  In  the  summer  of  1885, 


THE  HOMESTEADER  153 

acting  under  authorization  of  Congress,  Presi- 
dent Cleveland  ordered  the  removal  of  all  illegal 
inclosures  and  forbade  any  person  or  associa- 
tion to  prevent  the  peaceful  occupation  of  the 
public  land  by  homesteaders.  The  President 
had  already  cancelled  the  leases  by  which  a  great 
cattle  company  had  occupied  grazing  lands  in 
the  Indian  Territory.  Yet,  with  even-handed 
justice  he  kept  the  land  boomers  also  out  of 
these  coveted  lands,  until  the  Dawes  Act  of  1887 
allotted  the  tribal  lands  to  the  Indians  in  sever- 
alty  and  threw  open  the  remainder  to  the  im- 
patient homeseekers.  Waiting  thousands  were 
ready  at  the  Kansas  line,  eager  for  the  starting 
gun  which  was  to  let  loose  a  mad  stampede  of 
crazed  human  beings. 

It  always  was  contended  by  the  cowman  that 
these  settlers  coming  in  on  the  semi-arid  range 
could  not  make  a  living  there,  that  all  they 
could  do  was  legally  to  starve  to  death  some 
good  woman.  True,  many  of  them  could  not 
last  out  in  the  bitter  combined  fight  with  nature 
and  the  grasping  conditions  of  commerce  and 
transportation  of  that  time.  The  western  Cana- 
dian farmer  of  today  is  a  cherished,  almost 
a  petted  being.  But  no  one  ever  showed  any 


154      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

mercy  to  the  American  farmer  who  moved  out 
West. 

As  always  has  been  the  case,  a  certain  num- 
ber of  wagons  might  be  seen  passing  back  East, 
as  well  as  the  somewhat  larger  number  steadily 
moving  westward.  There  were  lean  years  and  dry 
years,  hot  years,  yellow  years  here  and  there  upon 
the  range.  The  phrase  written  on  one  disheart- 
ened farmer's  wagon  top,  "Going  back  to  my 
wife's  folks,"  became  historic. 

The  railways  were  finding  profit  in  carrying 
human  beings  out  to  the  cow-range  just  as  once 
they  had  in  transporting  cattle.  Indeed,  it  did 
not  take  the  wiser  railroad  men  long  to  see  that 
they  could  afford  to  set  down  a  farmer,  at  almost 
no  cost  for  transportation,  in  any  part  of  the  new 
West.  He  would  after  that  be  dependent  upon 
the  railroad  in  every  way.  The  railroads  de- 
liberately devised  the  great  land  boom  of  1886, 
which  was  more  especially  virulent  in  the  State 
of  Kansas.  Many  of  the  roads  had  lands  of 
their  own  for  sale,  but  what  they  wanted  most 
was  the  traffic  of  the  settlers.  They  knew  the 
profit  to  be  derived  from  the  industry  of  a 
dense  population  raising  products  which  must  be 
shipped,  and  requiring  imports  which  also  must 


THE  HOMESTEADER  155 

be  shipped.  One  railroad  even  offered  choice 
breeding-stock  free  on  request.  The  same  road, 
and  others  also,  preached  steadily  the  doctrine  of 
diversified  farming.  In  short,  the  railroads,  in 
their  own  interests,  did  all  they  could  to  make 
prosperous  the  farms  or  ranches  of  the  West. 
The  usual  Western  homestead  now  was  part 
ranch  and  part  farm,  although  the  term  "ranch" 
continued  for  many  years  to  cover  all  the  mean- 
ings of  the  farm  of  whatever  sort. 

There  appeared  now  in  the  new  country  yet 
another  figure  of  the  Western  civilization,  the 
land-boomer,  with  his  irresponsible  and  unregu- 
lated statements  in  regard  to  the  values  of  these 
Western  lands.  These  men  were  not  always  de- 
sirable citizens,  although  of  course  no  industry 
was  more  solid  or  more  valuable  than  that  of  le- 
gitimate handling  of  the  desirable  lands.  "Pub- 
lic spirit"  became  a  phrase  now  well  known  in 
any  one  of  scores  of  new  towns  springing  up  on 
the  old  cow-range,  each  of  which  laid  claims  to  be 
the  future  metropolis  of  the  world.  In  any  one 
of  these  towns  the  main  industry  was  that  of 
selling  lands  or  "real  estate."  During  the  Kan- 
sas boom  of  1886  the  land-boomers  had  their 
desks  in  the  lobbies  of  banks,  the  windows  of 


156      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

hardware  stores  —  any  place  and  every  place 
offering  room  for  a  desk  and  chair. 

Now  also  flourished  apace  the  industry  of 
mortgage  loans.  Eastern  money  began  to  flood 
the  western  Plains,  attracted  by  the  high  rates 
of  interest.  In  1886  the  customary  banking  in- 
terest in  western  Kansas  was  two  per  cent  a 
month.  It  is  easy  to  see  that  very  soon  such  a 
state  of  affairs  as  this  must  collapse.  The  in- 
dustry of  selling  town  lots  far  out  in  the  corn- 
fields, and  of  buying  unimproved  subdivision 
property  with  borrowed  money  at  usurious  rates 
of  interest,  was  one  riding  for  its  own  fall. 

None  the  less  the  Little  Fellow  kept  on  going 
out  into  the  West.  We  did  not  change  our  land 
laws  for  his  sake,  and  for  a  time  he  needed  no 
sympathy.  The  homestead  law  in  combination 
with  the  preemption  act  and  the  tree  claim  act 
would  enable  a  family  to  get  hold  of  a  very  sizable 
tract  of  land.  The  foundations  of  many  comfort- 
able fortunes  were  laid  in  precisely  this  way  by 
thrifty  men  who  were  willing  to  work  and  willing 
to  wait. 

It  was  not  until  1917  that  the  old  homestead 
law  limiting  the  settler  to  a  hundred  and  sixty 
acres  of  land  was  modified  for  the  benefit  of  the 


THE  HOMESTEADER  157 

stock-raiser.  The  stock-raising  homestead  law,  as 
it  is  called,  permits  a  man  to  make  entry  for  not 
more  than  six  hundred  and  forty  acres  of  unap- 
propriated land  which  shall  have  been  designated 
by  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior  as  "stock-raising 
land."  Cultivation  of  the  land  is  not  required, 
but  the  holder  is  required  to  make  "permanent 
improvements"  to  the  value  of  a  dollar  and 
twenty-five  cents  an  acre,  and  at  least  one-half  of 
these  improvements  must  be  made  within  three 
years  after  the  date  of  entry.  In  the  old  times 
the  question  of  proof  in  "proving  up"  was  very 
leniently  considered.  A  man  would  stroll  down  to 
the  land  office  and  swear  solemnly  that  he  had 
lived  the  legal  length  of  time  on  his  homestead, 
whereas  perhaps  he  had  never  seen  it  or  had 
no  more  than  ridden  across  it.  Today  matters 
perhaps  will  be  administered  somewhat  more 
strictly;  for  of  all  those  millions  of  acres  of  open 
land  once  in  the  West  there  is  almost  none  left 
worth  the  holding  for  farm  purposes. 

Such  dishonest  practices  were,  however,  indig- 
nantly denied  by  those  who  fostered  the  irrigation 
and  dry-farming  booms  which  made  the  last  phase 
of  exploitation  of  the  old  range.  A  vast  amount 
of  disaster  was  worked  by  the  failure  of  number- 


158     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

less  irrigation  companies,  each  of  them  offering 
lands  to  the  settlers  through  the  medium  of 
most  alluring  advertising.  In  almost  every  case 
the  engineers  underestimated  the  cost  of  getting 
water  on  the  land.  Very  often  the  amount  of 
water  available  was  not  sufficient  to  irrigate  the 
land  which  had  been  sold  to  settlers.  In  countless 
cases  the  district  irrigation  bonds  —  which  were 
offered  broadcast  by  Eastern  banks  to  their 
small  investors  —  were  hardly  worth  the  paper 
on  which  they  were  written.  One  after  another 
these  wildcat  irrigation  schemes,  purporting  to 
assure  sudden  wealth  in  apples,  pears,  celery, 
garden  truck,  cherries,  small  fruits,  alfalfa,  pe- 
cans, eucalyptus  or  catalpa  trees  —  anything  you 
liked  —  went  to  the  wall.  Sometimes  whole  com- 
munities became  straitened  by  the  collapse  of 
these  overblown  enterprises.  The  recovery  was 
slow,  though  usually  the  result  of  that  recovery 
was  a  far  healthier  and  more  stable  condition  of 
society. 

This  whole  question  of  irrigation  and  dry  farm- 
ing, this  or  that  phase  of  the  last  scrambling, 
feverish  settling  on  the  last  lands,  was  sorely 
wasteful  of  human  enterprise  and  human  happi- 
ness. It  was  much  like  the  spawning  rush  of 


THE  HOMESTEADER  159 

the  salmon  from  the  sea.  Many  perish.  A  few 
survive.  Certainly  there  never  was  more  cruel 
injustice  done  than  that  to  the  sober-minded 
Eastern  farmers,  some  of  them  young  men  in 
search  of  cheaper  homes,  who  sold  out  all  they 
had  in  the  East  and  went  out  to  the  dry  country 
to  farm  under  the  ditch,  or  to  take  up  that  still 
more  hazardous  occupation  —  successful  some- 
times,  though  always  hard  and  always  risky  — 
dry  farming  on  the  benches  which  cannot  be 
reached  with  irrigating  waters. 

Strangely  changed  was  all  the  face  of  the  cattle 
range  by  these  successive  and  startling  innova- 
tions. The  smoke  of  many  little  homes  rose 
now,  scattered  over  all  that  tremendous  country 
from  the  Rockies  to  the  edge  of  the  short  grass 
country,  from  Texas  to  the  Canadian  line.  The 
cattle  were  not  banished  from  the  range,  for 
each  little  farmer  would  probably  have  a  few 
cows  of  his  own;  and  in  some  fashion  the  great 
cowmen  were  managing  to  get  in  fee  tracts  of 
land  sufficient  for  their  purposes.  There  were 
land  leases  of  all  sorts  which  enabled  the  thrifty 
Westerner  who  knew  the  inside  and  out  of  local 
politics  to  pick  up  permanently  considerable 
tracts  of  land.  Some  of  these  ranches  held  to- 


160     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

gether  as  late  as  1916;  indeed,  there  are  some  such 
old-time  holdings  still  existent  in  the  West,  al- 
though far  more  rare  than  formerly  was  the  case. 

Under  all  these  conditions  the  price  of  land 
went  up  steadily.  Land  was  taken  eagerly  which 
would  have  been  refused  with  contempt  a  decade 
earlier.  The  parings  and  scraps  and  crumbs  of 
the  Old  West  now  were  fought  for  avidly. 

The  need  of  capital  became  more  and  more 
important  in  many  of  the  great  land  operations. 
Even  the  government  reclamation  enterprises 
could  not  open  lands  to  the  settler  on  anything 
like  the  old  homestead  basis.  The  water  right 
cost  money  —  sometimes  twenty-five  or  thirty 
dollars  an  acre;  in  some  of  the  private  reclama- 
tion enterprises,  fifty  dollars  an  acre,  or  even 
more.  Very  frequently  when  the  Eastern  farmer 
came  out  to  settle  on  such  a  tract  and  to  meet 
the  hard,  new,  and  expensive  conditions  of  life  in 
the  semi-arid  regions  he  found  that  he  could  not 
pay  out  on  the  land.  Perhaps  he  brought  two 
or  three  thousand  dollars  with  him.  It  usually 
was  the  industrial  mistake  of  the  land-boomer 
to  take  from  this  intending  settler  practically 
all  of  his  capital  at  the  start.  Naturally,  when 
the  new  farmers  were  starved  out  and  in  one  way 


THE  HOMESTEADER  161 

or  another  had  made  other  plans,  the  country 
itself  went  to  pieces.  That  part  of  it  was  wisest 
which  did  not  kill  the  goose  of  the  golden  egg. 
But  be  these  things  as  they  may  be  and  as  they 
were,  the  whole  readjustment  in  agricultural  values 
over  the  once  measureless  and  valueless  cow  coun- 
try was  a  stupendous  and  staggering  thing. 

Now  appeared  yet  another  agency  of  change. 
The  high  dry  lands  of  many  of  the  Rocky  Moun- 
tain States  had  long  been  regarded  covetously  by 
an  industry  even  more  cordially  disliked  by  the 
cattleman  than  the  industry  of  farming.  The 
sheepman  began  to  raise  his  head  and  to  plan  cer- 
tain things  for  himself  in  turn.  Once  the  herder 
of  sheep  was  a  meek  and  lowly  man,  content  to 
slink  away  when  ordered.  The  writer  himself 
in  the  dry  Southwest  once  knew  a  flock  of  six 
thousand  sheep  to  be  rounded  up  and  killed  by 
the  cattlemen  of  a  range  into  which  they  had 
intruded.  The  herders  went  with  the  sheep.  All 
over  the  range  the  feud  between  the  sheepmen 
and  the  cowmen  was  bitter  and  implacable.  The 
issues  in  those  quarrels  rarely  got  into  the  courts 
but  were  fought  out  on  the  ground.  The  old 
Wyoming  dead-line  of  the  cowmen  against  in- 
truding bands  of  Green  River  sheep  made  a  con- 


162      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

siderable  amount  of  history  which  was  never  re- 
corded. 

The  sheepmen  at  length  began  to  succeed  in 
their  plans.  Themselves  not  paying  many  taxes, 
not  supporting  the  civilization  of  the  country,  not 
building  the  schools  or  roads  or  bridges,  they  none 
the  less  claimed  the  earth  and  the  fullness  thereof. 

After  the  establishment  of  the  great  forest 
reserves,  the  sheepmen  coveted  the  range  thus  in- 
cluded. It  has  been  the  governmental  policy  to 
sell  range  privileges  in  the  forest  reserves  for 
sheep,  on  a  per  capita  basis.  Like  privileges  have 
been  extended  to  cattlemen  in  certain  of  the  re- 
serves. Always  the  contact  and  the  contest  be- 
tween the  two  industries  of  sheep  and  cows  have 
remained.  Of  course  the  issue  even  in  this  ancient 
contest  is  foregone  —  as  the  cowman  has  had  to 
raise  his  cows  under  fence,  so  ultimately  must  the 
sheepman  also  buy  his  range  in  fee  and  raise  his 
product  under  fence0 

The  wandering  bands  of  sheep  belong  nowhere. 
They  ruin  a  country.  It  is  a  pathetic  spectacle 
to  see  parts  of  the  Old  West  in  which  sheep  stead- 
ily have  been  ranged.  They  utterly  destroy  all  the 
game;  they  even  drive  the  fish  out  of  the  streams 
and  cut  the  grasses  and  weeds  down  to  the  surface 


THE  HOMESTEADER  163 

of  the  earth.  The  denuded  soil  crumbles  under 
their  countless  hoofs,  becomes  dust,  and  blows 
away.  They  leave  a  waste,  a  desert,  an  abomi- 
nation. 

There  were  yet  other  phases  of  change  which 
followed  hard  upon  the  heels  of  our  soldiers  after 
they  had  completed  their  task  of  subjugating  the 
tribes  of  the  buffalo  Indians.  After  the  homesteads 
had  been  proved  up  in  some  of  the  Northwest- 
ern States,  such  as  Montana  and  the  Dakotas, 
large  bodies  of  land  were  acquired  by  certain 
capitalistic  farmers.  All  this  new  land  had  been 
proved  to  be  exceedingly  prolific  of  wheat,  the 
great  new-land  crop.  The  farmers  of  the  North- 
west had  not  yet  learned  that  no  country  long 
can  thrive  which  depends  upon  a  single  crop. 
But  the  once  familiar  figures  of  the  bonanza 
farms  of  the  Northwest  —  the  pictures  of  their 
long  lines  of  reapers  or  self-binders,  twenty, 
thirty,  forty,  or  fifty  machines,  one  after  the 
other,  advancing  through  the  golden  grain  —  the 
pictures  of  their  innumerable  stacks  of  wheat  — 
the  figures  of  the  vast  mileage  of  their  fencing 
—  the  yet  more  stupendous  figures  of  the  outlay 
required  to  operate  these  farms,  and  the  splendid 
totals  of  the  receipts  from  such  operations  — 


164      TEE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

these  at  one  time  were  familiar  and  proudly  pre- 
sented features  of  boom  advertising  in  the  upper 
portions  of  our  black  land  belt,  which  lay  just 
at  the  eastern  edge  of  the  old  Plains. 

There  was  to  be  repeated  in  this  country  some- 
thing of  the  history  of  California.  In  the  great 
valleys,  such  as  the  San  Joaquin,  the  first  inter- 
ests were  pastoral,  and  the  cowmen  found  a  vast 
realm  which  seemed  to  be  theirs  forever.  There 
came  to  them,  however,  the  bonanza  wheat  farm- 
ers, who  flourished  there  about  1875  and  through 
the  next  decade.  Their  highly  specialized  industry 
boasted  that  it  could  bake  a  loaf  of  bread  out 
of  a  wheat  field  between  the  hours  of  sunrise 
and  sunset.  The  outlay  in  stock  and  machinery 
on  some  of  these  bonanza  ranches  ran  into 
enormous  figures.  But  here,  as  in  all  new  wheat 
countries,  the  productive  power  of  the  soil  soon 
began  to  decrease.  Little  by  little  the  number  of 
bushels  per  acre  lessened,  until  the  bonanza  farm- 
er found  himself  with  not  half  the  product  to 
sell  which  he  had  owned  the  first  few  years  of  his 
operations.  In  one  California  town  at  one  time  a 
bonanza  farmer  came  in  and  covered  three  city 
blocks  with  farm  machinery  which  he  had  turned 
over  to  the  bank  owning  the  mortgages  on  his 


THE  HOMESTEADER  165 

lands  and  plant.  He  turned  in  also  all  his  mules 
and  horses,  and  retired  worse  than  broke  from  an 
industry  in  which  he  had  once  made  his  hundreds 
of  thousands.  Something  of  this  same  story  was 
to  follow  in  the  Dakotas.  Presently  we  heard  no 
more  of  the  bonanza  wheat  farms;  and  a  little 
later  they  were  not.  The  one-crop  country  is 
never  one  of  sound  investing  values;  and  a  land 
boom  is  something  of  which  to  beware  —  always 
and  always  to  beware. 

The  prairie  had  passed;  the  range  had  passed; 
the  illegal  fences  had  passed;  and  presently  the 
cattle  themselves  were  to  pass  —  that  is  to  say, 
the  great  herds.  As  recently  as  five  years  ago 
(1912)  it  was  my  fortune  to  be  in  the  town  of 
Belle  Fourche,  near  the  Black  Hills  —  a  region 
long  accustomed  to  vivid  history,  whether  of 
Indians,  mines,  or  cows — at  the  time  when  the 
last  of  the  great  herds  of  the  old  industry  there- 
abouts were  breaking  up;  and  to  see,  coming  down 
to  the  cattle  chutes  to  be  shipped  to  the  East- 
ern stockyards,  the  last  hundreds  of  the  last  great 
Belle  Fourche  herd,  which  was  once  numbered 
in  thousands.  They  came  down  out  of  the  blue- 
edged  horizon,  threading  their  way  from  upper 
benches  down  across  the  dusty  valley.  The  dust 


166      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

of  their  travel  rose  as  it  had  twenty  years  earlier 
on  the  same  old  trail.  But  these  were  not  the 
same  cattle.  There  was  not  a  longhorn  among 
them;  there  has  not  been  a  longhorn  on  the 
range  for  many  years.  They  were  sleek,  fat, 
well-fed  animals,  heavy  and  stocky,  even  of  type, 
all  either  whitefaces  or  shorthorns.  With  them 
were  some  old-time  cowmen,  men  grown  gray 
in  range  work.  Alongside  the  herds,  after  the 
ancient  fashion  of  trailing  cattle,  rode  cowboys 
who  handled  their  charges  with  the  same  old 
skill.  But  even  the  cowboys  had  changed.  These 
were  without  exception  men  from  the  East  who 
had  learned  their  trade  here  in  the  West.  Here 
indeed  was  one  of  the  last  acts  of  the  great  drama 
of  the  Plains.  To  many  an  observer  there  it  was 
a  tragic  thing.  I  saw  many  a  cowman  there  the 
gravity  on  whose  face  had  nothing  to  do  with  com- 
mercial loss.  It  was  the  Old  West  he  mourned. 
I  mourned  with  him. 

Naturally  the  growth  of  the  great  stockyards 
of  the  Middle  West  had  an  effect  upon  all  the 
cattle-producing  country  of  the  West,  whether 
those  cattle  were  bred  in  large  or  in  small  num- 
bers. The  dealers  of  the  stockyards,  let  us  say, 
gradually  evolved  a  perfect  understanding  among 


THE  HOMESTEADER  167 

themselves  as  to  what  cattle  prices  ought  to  be  at 
the  Eastern  end  of  the  rails.  They  have  always 
pleaded  poverty  and  explained  t^e  extremely  small 
margin  of  profit  under  which  they  have  operated. 
Of  course,  the  repeated  turn-over  in  their  business 
has  been  an  enormous  thing;  and  their  industry, 
since  the  invention  of  refrigerator  cars  and  the  ship- 
ment of  dressed  beef  in  tins,  has  been  one  which 
has  extended  to  all  the  corners  of  the  world.  The 
great  packers  would  rather  talk  of  "  by-products  " 
than  of  these  things.  Always  they  have  been  poor, 
so  very  poor! 

For  a  time  the  railroads  east  of  the  stockyard 
cities  of  Kansas  City  and  Chicago  divided  up  pro 
rata  the  dressed  beef  traffic.  Investigation  after 
investigation  has  been  made  of  the  methods  of 
the  stockyard  firms,  but  thus  far  the  law  has 
not  laid  its  hands  successfully  upon  them.  Natu- 
rally of  late  years  the  extremely  high  price  of  beef 
has  made  greater  profit  to  the  cattle  raiser;  but 
that  man,  receiving  eight  or  ten  cents  a  pound 
on  the  hoof,  is  not  getting  rich  so  fast  as  did  his 
predecessor,  who  got  half  of  it,  because  he  is  now 
obliged  to  feed  hay  and  to  enclose  his  range. 
Where  once  a  half  ton  of  hay  might  have  been 
sufficient  to  tide  a  cow  over  the  bad  part  of  the 


168     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

winter,  the  Little  Fellow  who  fences  his  own 
range  of  a  few  hundred  acres  is  obliged  to  figure 
on  two  or  three  tons,  for  he  must  feed  his  herd 
on  hay  through  the  long  months  of  the  winter. 

The  ultimate  consumer,  of  course,  is  the  one 
who  pays  the  freight  and  stands  the  cost  of  all 
this.  Hence  we  have  the  swift  growth  of  Amer- 
ican discontent  with  living  conditions.  There  is 
no  longer  land  for  free  homes  in  America.  This  is 
no  longer  a  land  of  opportunity.  It  is  no  longer 
a  poor  man's  country.  We  have  arrived  all  too 
.swiftly  upon  the  ways  of  the  Old  World.  And 
today,  in  spite  of  our  love  of  peace,  we  are  in  an 
Old  World's  war! 

The  insatiable  demand  of  Americans  for  cheap 
lands  assumed  a  certain  international  phase  at 
the  period  lying  between  1900  and  1913  or  later 
—  the  years  of  the  last  great  boom  in  Canadian 
lands.  The  Dominion  Government,  represented 
by  shrewd  and  enterprising  men  able  to  handle 
large  undertakings,  saw  with  a  certain  satisfaction 
of  its  own  the  swift  passing  from  the  market  of 
all  the  cheap  lands  of  the  United  States.  It  was 
proved  to  the  satisfaction  of  all  that  very  large 
tracts  of  the  Canadian  plains  also  would  raise 
wheat,  quite  as  well  as  had  the  prairies  of  Mon- 


THE  HOMESTEADER  169 

tana  or  Dakota.  The  Canadian  railroads,  with 
lands  to  sell,  began  to  advertise  the  wheat  indus- 
try in  Alberta  and  Saskatchewan.  The  Canadian 
Government  went  into  the  publicity  business  on 
its  own  part.  To  a  certain  extent  European  im- 
migration was  encouraged,  but  the  United  States 
really  was  the  country  most  combed  out  for 
settlers  for  these  Canadian  lands.  As  by  magic, 
millions  of  acres  in  western  Canada  were  settled. 

The  young  American  farmers  of  our  near  North- 
west were  especially  coveted  as  settlers,  because 
they  knew  how  to  farm  these  upper  lands  far 
better  than  any  Europeans,  and  because  each  of 
them  was  able  to  bring  a  little  capital  of  ready 
money  into  Canada.  The  publicity  campaign 
waged  by  Canadians  in  our  Western  States  in 
one  season  took  away  more  than  a  hundred  and 
fifty  thousand  good  young  farmers,  resolved  to 
live  under  another  flag.  In  one  year  the  State 
of  Iowa  lost  over  fifteen  million  dollars  of  money 
withdrawn  from  bank  deposits  by  farmers  moving 
across  the  line  into  Canada. 

The  story  of  these  land  rushes  was  much  the 
same  there  as  it  had  been  with  us.  Not  all  suc- 
ceeded. The  climatic  conditions  were  far  more 
severe  than  any  which  we  had  endured,  and  if  the 


170      THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

soil  for  a  time  in  some  regions  seemed  better  than 
some  of  our  poorest,  at  least  there  waited  for  the 
one-crop  man  the  same  future  which  had  been 
discovered  for  similar  methods  within  our  own 
confines.  But  the  great  Canadian  land  booms, 
carefully  fostered  and  well  developed,  offered  a 
curious  illustration  of  the  tremendous  pressure 
of  all  the  populations  of  the  world  for  land 
and  yet  more  land. 

In  the  year  1911  the  writer  saw,  all  through  the 
Peace  River  Valley  and  even  in  the  neighborhood 
of  the  Little  Slave  Lake,  the  advance-guard  of 
wheat  farmers  crowding  out  even  beyond  the 
Canadian  frontier  in  the  covetous  search  for  yet 
more  cheap  land.  In  1912  I  talked  with  a  school 
teacher,  who  herself  had  homestead  land  in  the 
Judith  Basin  of  Montana  —  once  sacred  to  cows 
—  and  who  was  calmly  discussing  the  advisa- 
bility of  going  up  into  the  Peace  River  country 
to  take  up  yet  more  homestead  land  under  the 
regulations  of  the  Dominion  Government!  In 
the  year  1913  I  saw  an  active  business  done  in 
town  lots  at  Fort  McMurray,  five  hundred  miles 
north  of  the  last  railroad  of  Alberta,  on  the 
ancient  Athabasca  waterway  of  the  fur  trade! 

Who  shall  state  the  limit  of  all  this  expansion? 


THE  HOMESTEADER  171 

The  farmer  has  ever  found  more  and  more  land  on 
which  he  could  make  a  living;  he  is  always  taking 
land  which  his  predecessor  has  scornfully  refused. 
If  presently  there  shall  come  the  news  that  the 
land  boomer  has  reached  the  mouth  of  the  Mac- 
kenzie River  —  as  long  ago  he  reached  certain 
portions  of  the  Yukon  and  Tanana  country  — if 
it  shall  be  said  that  men  are  now  selling  town 
lots  under  the  Midnight  Sun  —  what  then?  We 
are  building  a  government  railroad  of  our  own 
almost  within  shadow  of  Mount  McKinley  in 
Alaska.  There  are  steamboats  on  all  these  great 
sub-Arctic  rivers.  Perhaps,  some  day,  a  power 
boat  may  take  us  easily  where  I  have  stood, 
somewhat  wearied,  at  that  spot  on  the  Little 
Bell  tributary  of  the  Porcupine,  where  a  slab  on 
a  post  said,  "Portage  Road  to  Ft.  McPherson" 
—  a  "road'*  which  is  not  even  a  trail,  but  which 
crosses  the  most  northerly  of  all  the  passes  of 
the  Rockies,  within  a  hundred  miles  of  the  Arctic 
Ocean. 

Land,  land,  more  land!  It  is  the  cry  of  the 
ages,  more  imperative  and  clamorous  now  than 
ever  in  the  history  of  the  world  and  only  arrested 
for  the  time  by  the  cataclysm  of  the  Great  War. 
The  earth  is  well-nigh  occupied  now.  Australia, 


172     THE  PASSING  OF  THE  FRONTIER 

New  Zealand,  Canada,  even  Africa,  are  coloniza- 
tion grounds.  What  will  be  the  story  of  the 
world  at  the  end  of  the  Great  War  none  may 
predict.  For  the  time  there  will  be  more  land 
left  in  Europe;  but,  unbelievably  soon,  the  Great 
War  will  have  been  forgotten;  and  then  the  march 
of  the  people  will  be  resumed  toward  such  fron- 
tiers of  the  world  as  yet  may  remain.  Land, 
land,  more  land! 

Always  in  America  we  have  occupied  the  land 
as  fast  as  it  was  feasible  to  do  so.  We  have  sur- 
vived incredible  hardships  on  the  mining  frontier, 
have  lived  through  desperate  social  conditions 
in  the  cow  country,  have  fought  many  of  our 
bravest  battles  in  the  Indian  country.  Always 
it  has  been  the  frontier  which  has  allured  many 
of  our  boldest  souls.  And  always,  just  back  of 
the  frontier,  advancing,  receding,  crossing  it  this 
way  and  that,  succeeding  and  failing,  hoping  and 
despairing  —  but  steadily  advancing  in  the  net 
result  —  has  come  that  portion  of  the  population 
which  builds  homes  and  lives  in  them,  and  which 
is  not  content  with  a  blanket  for  a  bed  and  the 
sky  for  a  roof  above. 

We  had  a  frontier  once.  It  was  our  most  price- 
less possession.  It  has  not  been  possible  to  elimi- 


THE  HOMESTEADER  173 

nate  from  the  blood  of  the  American  West,  diluted 
though  it  has  been  by  far  less  worthy  strains,  all 
the  iron  of  the  old  home-bred  frontiersmen.  The 
frontier  has  been  a  lasting  and  ineradicable  influ- 
ence for  the  good  of  the  United  States.  It  was 
there  we  showed  our  fighting  edge,  our  unconquer- 
able resolution,  our  undying  faith.  There,  for  a 
time  at  least,  we  were  Americans. 

We  had  our  frontier.  We  shall  do  ill  indeed  if 
we  forget  and  abandon  its  strong  lessons,  its  great 
hopes,  its  splendid  human  dreams. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

ANDY  ADAMS,  The  Log  of  a  Cowboy,  1903.  The  Outlet, 
1905.  Homely  but  excellently  informing  books 
done  by  a  man  rarely  qualified  for  his  task  by  long 
experience  in  the  cattle  business  and  on  the  trail. 
Nothing  better  exists  than  Adams's  several  books 
for  the  man  who  wishes  trustworthy  information 
on  the  early  American  cattle  business. 

GEORGE  A.  FORSYTH,  The  Story  of  the  Soldier,  1900. 

GEORGE  BIRD  GRINNELL,  The  Story  of  the  Indian, 
1895. 

EMERSON  HOUGH,  The  Story  of  the  Cowboy,  1897. 

CHARLES  HOWARD  SHINN,  The  Story  of  the  Mine,  1901. 

CY  WARMAN,  The  Story  of  the  Railroad,  1898.  The 
foregoing  books  of  Appleton's  interesting  series 
known  as  The  Story  of  the  West  are  valuable  as 
containing  much  detailed  information,  done  by 
contemporaries  of  wide  experience. 

FRANCIS  PARKMAN,  The  Oregon  Trail,  1901,  with  pre- 
face by  the  author  to  the  edition  of  1892.  This  is  a 
reprint  of  the  edition  published  in  1857  under  the 
title  Prairie  and  Rocky  Mountain  Life,  or  The 
California  and  Oregon  Trail,  and  has  always  been 
held  as  a  classic  in  the  literature  of  the  West.  It 
holds  a  certain  amount  of  information  regarding 
life  on  the  Plains  at  the  middle  of  the  last  century. 
175 


176  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  original  title  is  more  accurate  than  the  more 
usual  one  The  Oregon  Trail,  as  the  book  itself  is  in 
no  sense  an  exclusive  study  of  that  historic  highway. 

COLONEL  R.  B.  MARCY,  U.  S.  A.,  Thirty  Years  of  Army 
Life  on  the  Border,  1866.  An  admirable  and  very 
informing  book  done  by  an  Army  officer  who  was 
also  a  sportsman  and  a  close  observer  of  the  con- 
ditions of  the  life  about  him.  One  of  the  standard 
books  for  any  library  of  early  Western  literature. 

EMERSON  HOUGH,  The  Story  of  the  Outlaw,  1907.  A 
study  of  the  Western  desperado,  with  historical 
narratives  of  famous  outlaws,  stories  of  noted 
border  movements,  Vigilante  activities,  and  armed 
conflicts  on  the  border. 

NATHANIEL  PITT  LANGFORD,  Vigilante  Days  and  Ways, 
1893.  A  storehouse  of  information  done  in 
graphic  anecdotal  fashion  of  the  scenes  in  the 
early  mining  camps  of  Idaho  and  Montana. 
Valuable  as  the  work  of  a  contemporary  writer 
who  took  part  in  the  scenes  he  describes. 

JOHN  C.  VAN  TRAMP,  Prairie  and  Rocky  Mountain  Ad- 
ventures or  Life  in  the  West,  1870.  A  study  of  the 
States  and  territorial  regions  of  our  Western  em- 
pire, embracing  history,  statistics,  and  geography, 
with  descriptions  of  the  chief  cities  of  the  West. 
In  large  part  a  compilation  of  earlier  Western 
literature. 

SAMUEL  BOWLES,  Our  New  West,  1869.  Records  of 
travel  between  the  Mississippi  River  and  the 
Pacific  Ocean,  with  details  regarding  scenery, 
agriculture,  mines,  business,  social  life,  etc., 
including  a  full  description  of  the  Pacific  States 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  177 

and  studies  of  the  "Mormons,  Indians,  and 
Chinese"  at  that  time. 

HIRAM  MARTIN  CHITTENDEN,  The  American  Fur  Trade 
of  the  Far  West,  1902.  The  work  of  a  distinguished 
Army  officer.  Done  with  the  exact  care  of  an  Army 
engineer.  An  extraordinary  collection  of  facts  and 
a  general  view  of  the  picturesque  early  industry  of 
the  fur  trade,  which  did  so  much  toward  develop- 
ing the  American  West.  See  also  his  History  of 
Steamboat  Navigation  on  the  Missouri  River  (1903). 

A.  J.  SOWELL,  Early  Settlers  and  Indian  Fighters  of 
Southwest  Texas,  1900.  A  local  book,  but  done 
with  contemporary  accuracy  by  a  man  who  also 
studied  the  Texas  Rangers  and  who  was  familiar 
with  some  of  the  earlier  frontier  characters  of  the 
Southwest. 

The  foregoing  volumes  are  of  course  but  a  few  among 
the  many  scores  or  hundreds  which  will  have  been  read 
avidly  by  every  man  concerned  with  frontier  life  or 
with  the  expansion  of  the  American  people  to  the  West. 
Space  lacks  for  a  fuller  list,  but  the  foregoing  readings 
will  serve  to  put  upon  the  trail  of  wider  information  any 
one  interested  in  these  and  kindred  themes. 

Let  especial  stress  again  be  laid  upon  the  preeminent 
value  of  books  done  by  contemporaries,  men  who  wrote, 
upon  the  ground,  of  things  which  they  actually  saw 
and  actually  understood.  It  is  not  always,  or  perhaps 
often,  that  these  contemporary  books  achieve  the  place 
which  they  ought  to  have  and  hold. 

Among  the  many  books  dealing  with  the  Indians 
and  Indian  Wars,  the  following  may  be  mentioned : 


178  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

J.  P.  DUNN,  Massacres  of  the  Mountains,  A  History 
of  the  Indian  Wars  of  the  Far  West,  1886. 

L.  E.  TEXTOR,   Official  Relations  between  the  United 
States  and  the  Sioux  Indians,  1896. 

G.  W.  MANYPENNY,  Our  Indian  Wards,  1880. 

There  is  an  extensive  bibliography   appended   to 

Frederic   L.    Paxson's    The  Last    American    Frontier 

(1910),  the  first  book  to  bring  together  the  many 

aspects  of  the  Far  West. 


INDEX 


Abilene  (Kan.),  36,  37,  144 
Adams,  Thomas,  63 
Alder  Gulch  (Mont.),  63,  70 
American   Horse,    Indian   chief, 

123 

Apache  Indians,  134-35 
Ashley,  W.  H.,  General,  89 
Austin,  S.  F.,  19 
Australia,     survival     of     Saxon 

frontier  in,  6-7 

Baker,  E.  M.,  Major,  131 

Baker  Massacre,  131-32 

Bannack  (Mont.),  65-68 

Belle  Fourche  (S.  D.),  165 

Benton,  Fort,  16,  63 

Bent's  Fort,  17 

Black  Kettle,  Indian  chief,  123, 

127 

Bonneville,  B.  L.  E.,  Captain,  89 
Breen,      Patrick,      diary,      106; 

quoted,    106-08 
Bridger,  Fort  (Utah),  63,  101 
Brown,     George,     associate    of 

Piummer,  76-77 

California,  attraction  for  set- 
tlers (1849),  15;  attempt  to 
take  Texas  cattle  to,  35;  dis- 
covery of  gold  (1849),  57; 
bonanza  wheat  farmers  in, 
164-65 

Campbell,  89 

Canada,  Western  land  boom  in, 
168-72 

Carson,  Kit,  92 

Carson  (Nev.),  59,  60 

Cattle    industry    in   the    West, 


17-19,  20-25.  26-27.  31  et 
seq.,  138  et  seq. 

Chicago,  cattle  market  in,  167 

Chisholm  Trail,  141 

Clark,  William,  11 

Coffeyville  (Kan.),  14C 

Commerce  on  the  Santa  Fe 
Trail,  83-87 

Cowboy,  product  of  the  West,  40- 
41;  costume  and  outfit,  42-48; 
work  of  the  round-up,  48-51; 
amusements,  51-54;  personal 
characteristics,  54 

Crawford,  Hank,  sheriff  of  min- 
ers' court,  67 

Crazy  Horse,  Indian  chief,  123 

Crook,  George,  General,  134 

Cumberlands,  survival  of  the 
frontier  in  the,  4-6 

Custer,  G.  A.,  Lieutenant-Colo- 
nel, 127,  132-33,  135-36 

Dance,  Walter,  64 

Dawes  Act  (1887),  153 

Dempsey,  Robert,  63 

Dodge,  Richard,  Colonel,  quoted, 

118-19 
Dodge  City  (Kan.),  36,  144-45. 

146 

Dodge,  Fort,  37 
Donner,    Tamsen,    98,    106-09; 

letter  of,  98-101 
Donner  Party,  98-109 

Ellsworth  (Kan.),  36,  145 


Fetterman  Massacre,  124-26 
Fisk,  J.  L.,  Captain,  64 


179 


180 


INDEX 


Florence  (Id.),  59,  63,  64 
Forsyth,  "Sandy,"  General,  128- 

131 
Forty-Niners    fail    to    discover 

wealth  of  Plains,  15 
Fraser  River  valley  (B.  C.),  rush 

for  gold  to,  57,  59 
Fremont,  J.  C.,  17,  89,  92-93 
Frontier,  meaning  of  term,  1-10; 
fascination  of,   2-3;   focus  of 
the  old,  82;  changing  of,  112- 
13;  last,  113;  end  of  (1885), 
156;  an  influence  for  good,  173 

Geronimo,  Indian  chief,  135 

Glick,  Dr.,  67 

Gold,  influence  of  discovery  upon 
settlement,  57  et  seq. 

Gold  Creek  (Mont.),  gold  dis- 
covered, 62-63 

Golddigger,  Tom,  63 

Graves,  F.  W.,  104 

Great  Bend  (Kan.),  36,  37 

Hall,  Fort,  16 

Hauser,  S.  T.,  64 

Helena  (Mont.),  70,  82 

Helm,  Boone,  associate  of  Plum- 

mer,  78 

Hereford,  Robert,  63 
Homestead  law  (1862),  137-40, 

156-57 

Homesteaders,  the,  151  et  seq. 
Hough,  Emerson,   The  Story  of 

the  Cowboy,  cited,  31  (note) 

Idaho,  gold  camps  in,  58;  gold 
seekers  in,  59;  Territory  of, 
organized  (1863),  68-69 

Illinois,  Texas  cattle  driven  to, 
35 

Indians,  of  the  Plains,  14;  use  of 
horses  by,  21;  troubles  in 
Montana,  70;  conflicts  with 
U.  S.  Army,  114  et  seq.;  segre- 
gation proposed,  126;  as  cattle 
thieves,  143-44 

Irrigation,  changes  brought 
about  by,  54;  failure  of  many 


schemes,  157-60;  Government 
reclamation  enterprises,  160- 
61 

Ives,  George,  associate  of  Plum- 
mer,  76-77 

Jacobs,  J.  M.,  63 
Joseph,  Indian  chief,  132 

Kansas,  boom  of  1886,  155-56 
Kansas  City,  cattle  market  in, 

167 
Keseburg,  Lewis,  108 

Langford,  N.  P.,  Vigilante  Days 

and  Ways,  quoted,  68,  70-72, 

77  (note),  79-80 
La  Verendrye,  21 
Lewis,  Meriwether,  11 
Lewis    and     Clark    expedition, 

11-15,  85 

Lewiston  (Id.),  59,  60 
Lisa,  Manuel,  89 
Little  Big  Horn,  battle  on  the, 

132-33 

Little  Rock,  Indian  chief,  127 
Long   Trail,   the,   of  the  cattle 

range,  31-35,  36,  37-38 
Louisiana,  cattle  taken  to,  35 

McGlashan,  C.  F.,  The  History 

of    the     Donner     Party,     94; 

quoted,  95-97,  102-03,  103-04 
McKnight,  Baird,  and  Chambers 

party,  86 

Magruder,  Lloyd,  76 
Marcy,    R.    B.,    Colonel,    Army 

Life   on   the   Border,    quoted, 

115-16,  117 

Maverick,  146-47  (note) 
Meeks,  Jake,  63 
Mexico,    original    cow   country, 

21;  trading  with,  87 
Miles,  N.  A.,  General,  135 
Mississippi  Valley,  settlement  of, 

12-13 
Missouri    River    as    a    frontier 

pathway,  88-90 
Modoc  War,  133 


INDEX 


181 


Montana,  gold  discovered  in 
(1852),  62;  miners  come  to 
Gold  Creek  (1857),  62-63; 
first  election  in,  63-64;  popu- 
lation of  mining  camps,  65- 
66;  Territory  of,  formed 
(1864),  69;  life  in  mining 
camps,  70  et  seq.;  Vigilantes 
in,  76  et  seq. 

Mormons,  15 

Natchez  Trace,  19 

Nevada,  Texas  herds  driven  to, 
35;  gold  camps  in,  57,  59 

Newton  (Kan.),  36,  145 

North  America  as  the  frontier, 
3-4 

Northwest,  the,  effect  of  im- 
migration on,  152-53;  wheat 
growing  in,  163-65 

Ogallalla  (Neb.),  141,  145 

Oregon,  gold  seekers  in,  59 

Oregon  Trail,  90-93 

Oro  Fino  (Id.),  59 

Overland  Trail,  see  Oregon  Trail 

Pike,  Zebulon,  Captain,  85,  86 

Pike's  Peak,  rush  for  gold  to 
(1859),  58;  settlers  in  Mon- 
tana from,  64 

Plummer,  Henry,  66-67,  69-70, 
74-75,  76-78 

Powell,  J.  W.,  63 

Prairies,  delay  in  settlement  of, 
12-13 

Ray,  Ned,  associate  of  Plummer, 

78 

Red  Cloud,  Indian  chief,  123 
Roman  Nose,  Indian  chief,  123, 

129,  130 

Salmon  River  mines,   Montana 

settlers  bound  for,  64,  65 
Salt  Lake,  supply  post  at,  65 
Santa  Fe  Trail,  83-84,  85,  86,  91 
Sheep-raising,  162-64 


Sheridan,  P.  H.,  General,  126 

Sherman,  W.  T.,  General,  quoted, 
125-26 

Sibley,  H.  H.,  General,  121 

Sioux  Indians,  120-21,  132 

Slade,  Joseph,  80-81 

Stinson,  Buck,  associate  of  Plum- 
mer, 78 

Stockraising  homestead  law 
(1917),  157 

Stuart,  Granville,  62,  64 

Stuartv  James,  62,  64 

Sublette,  89 

Texas,  colonizing  of,  19;  cattle 
industry  in,  20  et  seq. 

Transportation,  early  methods, 
30;  railroads  across  the  range, 
30-31;  on  the  Santa  Fe  Trail, 
83-84;  railroads'  part  in  set- 
tling the  West,  154-55 

Vigilantes,   in   Montana,   76   et 

seq.',  of  the  cattle  range,  145 
Virginia  City  (Mont.),  70,  71,  72 
Virginia  City  (Nev.),  79 

Walla  Walla  (Wash.),  59,  60,  65 

Washington,  gold  seekers  in,  59 

West,  character  of  the  Old 
American,  7-10;  "The  Great 
American  Desert,"  12;  settle- 
ment of,  15  et  seq.;  develop- 
ment of  the  cattle  industry, 
17-19;  climate,  25-26;  under- 
lying causes  of  settlement,  30 
et  seq.;  mining  camps,  -61; 
Territories  organized  and 
States  admitted,  69  (note); 
changes  in,  81-82;  beginnings 
of  commerce,  83-87 

Western  Trail,  141 

Wichita  (Kan.),  36,  143 

Williams,  Bill,  92 

Wyeth,  Nathaniel,  89 

Yager,  Red,  associate  of  Plum- 
mer, 76,  77 


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